This conference is about problematizing assessment but I want to start further back and problematize what we mean by competence. I think it is fair to say that when clinicians speak about assessing competence they have in mind the assessment of skills. However, I want to suggest that competence goes well beyond skills, at least if we understand skills in the narrow sense of technical legal skills. I think competence can be said to also include a values dimension. Moreover, it can be argued that if this dimension is added to the notion of skills, and clinical legal education (CLE) is expanded to include an understanding of how lawyers skills are used, for whom and to what end, it might help reverse the traditional and still continuing antipathy in many law schools to CLE. In the rest of the paper I first flesh out this argument and justify the focus on ethical as well as skills competence. I then turn to what exactly I assess in my CLE programme at the University of Strathclyde and, drawing on the assessment regimes in the relevant classes, seek to provide some food for thought about alternative means of assessment and clinical teaching.
