Home / Spring 2020 Law Faculty Information
The following is a summary of information circulated to full-time and adjunct faculty in connection with our transition to remote instruction during the Spring 2020 term.
Exams will continue to be administered on the day on which they were originally scheduled, but students will not be required to start and complete the exam at the specific hours originally assigned. Faculty may still elect to limit the time allowed for students to complete the exam to the originally scheduled time (e.g., three hours for a three-credit course). But students will be permitted to start the exam at any hour on the scheduled day and the allotted time for the exam will begin to run from the moment they first access the exam. The exam software will monitor the time and will automatically end the exam when the student reaches the allotted time indicated for that particular examination.
For professors who have previously announced or are planning to give take-home exams, we will by default give students an extended window of time (e.g., eight hours) during which to complete this exam. Recognizing that students may have multiple take-home exams this semester, professors have been advised to design their exams to be capable of completion within a regularly scheduled in-class exam time (e.g., three hours), no matter how much time students are allowed. We have also encouraged faculty to consider imposing word limits on exam answers, particularly for take-home exams.
Faculty have also been strongly counseled to reexamine their exam format in light of the disparate conditions under which students will be taking the exam. We anticipate that most, if not all, faculty will choose to use open-book, essay-format exams. Faculty will communicate to their students the revised plans for their exam format so that students may plan accordingly.
The Dean has announced a new grading policy for the Spring 2020 semester. Under the policy, the Law School (in line with many other law schools around the country) is requiring all students to be graded on a mandatory Pass/Fail system for the Spring 2020 semester. Under this plan, students in all classes will receive a grade of High Pass (“HP”), Pass (“P”), or Fail (“F”) for their Spring 2020 coursework, whether based on an examination, a paper, or performance of skills in an experiential course. The Dean’s memo, which you can find here, explains the policy in greater detail.
Section II.L of the Student Handbook permits students to withdraw from certain upper-class courses without a “W” notation on their transcripts as late as the fourth week in the semester, with permission from the Assistant Dean of Students. For the Spring 2020 semester only, we will extend that deadline until Monday, April 13 (the first class day after Spring Break). This will give students an opportunity to reassess their course loads in light of their new circumstances, including any challenges they may now face in completing academic requirements. (This extended deadline does not apply to 1L courses or those upper-level courses not covered by section II.L of the Handbook.)
You can review the revised Spring 2020 course and exam schedule for the Law School here and a revised calendar reflecting the changes here. Our approach is to clear three Fridays and one Saturday for use as additional make-up days as early as we can over the next few weeks. This will preserve study days and the original exam schedule for all upper-class courses. We have also rescheduled one 1L exam.
Because of the impracticability of scheduling classes on Friday and Saturday evenings, we will schedule these make-ups individually with adjunct faculty who teach on Fridays or in the afternoon. Please contact Christina Roux or Onnig Dombalagian if you have questions about cancellations and make-up classes.
If you need to cancel one or more scheduled classes, or to make up one or more previously canceled classes, please contact Christina Roux as you normally would to reschedule a canceled class. She will cancel the existing Zoom reservation and create a new one for you. As is typical with rescheduled classes, we hope that you will be liberal with your policies regarding attendance and share the recording in reasonable circumstances.
Many students will have obligations or limitations that reasonably conflict with or frustrate attendance at their classes. We have decided to configure Zoom meetings to record classes, but to allow each faculty member to share the recording with students at his or her discretion.
In administering your attendance policies and making recordings available, we ask faculty to balance reasonable concerns about the integrity of their classes against the reasonable needs of students who will be traveling to distant time zones, who may experience issues with their Internet connections to live classes, who may have conflicting parental responsibilities as schools and workplaces close, and who may be quarantined without Internet access upon return to their home countries.
The University encourages all faculty to host office hours and to accept invitations to one-on-one meetings, as they would normally do, in the online environment (for example by holding an open meeting in Zoom for those who would like to drop in).
If you haven’t logged into GIBSON or another Tulane site recently, please take a moment to look up your Tulane username and to reset your Tulane password. You will need to use your credentials to host meetings through Tulane’s Zoom platform.
You will need to activate your Tulane Zoom account and download the Zoom Client app onto your computer in order to host Zoom meetings. Please consult the following documents to do so:
Tulane's Teach Anywhere Toolkit provides a variety of resources for remote instruction. Some quick reference pages include:
We have booked your class meetings for the remainder of the term. You should have received a meeting notice from a member of the Academic Services team with the recurring meeting ID for your classes and a URL to access the meeting room.
You may notice that we have booked your classes through Canvas (the University’s preferred learning management system), as a convenience to those students and faculty who are familiar with Canvas and prefer to use it for the remainder of the course.
For those faculty who are not familiar with Canvas or prefer TWEN, you will be able to access your Zoom meeting via the URL we have provided you without using Canvas; accordingly there is no need to learn or adapt to Canvas. Please correspond with your classes or you normally would.
If you would like to view your courses in Canvas, please log into GIBSON (https://gibson.tulane.edu) with your Tulane credentials and select "Canvas" from the sidebar or tab titled "Administrative": this link will take you to a dashboard where you can view all of your courses and your meeting calendar.
If you are having difficulty setting up your hardware or accessing Tulane's Zoom platform, please contact the Law Help Desk or the University's IT Help Desk. They can also help you test your hardware readiness and Zoom access, and help you with using Zoom controls.