The University of Hong Kong

Department of Law

Academic Year of 2019-2020

Examiner’s Report

[This report will be posted onto intranet immediately after the release of exam results]

Course code: LLAW6222 Course title: Financial Dispute Resolution

Report prepared by: Sala Sihombing Date: 16 June 2020

The FDR course is designed to provide experiential learning. Following Chinese New
Year, it became clear that the course would need to be conducted online. This led to a
significant amount of work to redesign the course components of lecture and roleplays.

The students embraced the challenge of learning online and my key observation is that
I was impressed by their diligence and participation. The students were given
information for their roleplays and conducted these independently. They were able to
prepare individual debriefing sheets. In the main, these provided insightful comment
and observations from the participants. Although we all missed the opportunity to be in
the same classroom together, it seemed that the students made the most of the online
environment. I would like to thank them all for their hard work and diligent efforts.

For one assessment, the students prepared a letter which was to provide an elderly and
vulnerable client advice about her process options. The most successful letters
provided factual information and identified the specific challenges confronting this client.
In addition, the highest marks went to those who appropriately framed their letters and
wrote to the recipient. The less successful letters either failed to correctly identify
process options or, more commonly, failed to consider the nature of the recipient.

The other assessment this year was the research paper. There was a wide discrepancy
in performance. The most successful papers shared some common traits:
 Well written and well structured
 Clear thesis
 Interesting topic
 Well argued – i.e. opinions and ideas were supported with factual evidence or
academic research
 Appropriate citation and extensive reference to academic research papers /
publications

The less successful papers also shared some common traits:

 Poorly written and lacking in structure
 No clear thesis or lack of coherent thesis
 Excessive description
 Limited to materials or information discussed / provided in class
 Poorly argued – opinions / personal observations presented without support or
reference
 None or Inadequate reference to academic research papers / publications