Improving Commerce Students' Performance in Business Law

This paper outlines the process and the knowledge from a project that the authors have been undertaking since late 2006 in attempting to improve commerce students' outcomes in their first law subject. The project involved the analysis of written exam responses of students enrolled in the first year core Business Law subject in Semester 2, 2006 and also included interviews with students who had not passed the subject and those who had received Distinction grades or above. The aims of the project were to: -Investigate which topics (areas of law) students choose, or do not choose, to respond to on the exam and which problem questions are poorly answered. -Conduct a discourse analysis of selected problem questions to explore the written discourse strategies used, and not used, by 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' students. -Gain insights into how students gained an understanding of the content and the conventions of Business Law writing, the strategies they used for exam preparation and what additional support or direction they felt could have improved their performance.