Harvard Law School provides a lively, full-time, in-person rigorous educational environment. For generations, its teachers have taken instruction and pedagogy very seriously. Before you join our community, we want to let you know what the faculty expect if you come here.
Active Classroom Participation and Attendance
The HLS classroom is characterized by active, inductive, and sometimes experiential teaching that requires in-person and real-time processing and response to information and discussion. We expect students to engage in vigorous discussion and debate as part of the educational process in a law school and to engage constructively with colleagues in and out of the classroom.
To achieve their pedagogical goals, Harvard Law School faculty use a variety of teaching methods in their classrooms. Students should be prepared for the fact that some of their faculty will use variations on the Socratic Method in the classroom for part or all of their class. This means faculty will ask students to be prepared to answer questions through one of or a combination of real-time questioning (e.g., cold calls where students are called on to answer questions without prior notice or warm calls where they are given some prior notice), panel systems, group deliberation and reporting back, among other modes of eliciting student participation. All students should be prepared to participate in the method of instruction a faculty member has designed for the course.
Regular and consistent attendance is essential to ensuring an appropriate level of engagement in the course, including through class participation.
By attendance, we expect students to be physically present in the classroom. The faculty have concluded that hybrid education, by which some students participate in person and others remotely, is inconsistent with our goal of fostering equitable engagement of all students in the same setting using the same pedagogical strategies.
We expect all students to be able to filter and respond to information in real time. This is not compatible, for example, with allowing a student to make up a substantial portion of or revisit a course by listening to recordings of what took place in person.
Examinations and Grading
Our system of examinations and grading aims for fair, uniform, secure, and accurate assessments of all students in a course on an equitable playing field. Several policies follow from this of which students should be aware:
First, we are committed to ensuring fairness and accuracy in grading exams. For that reason, our exams must be graded roughly contemporaneously with one another and anonymously so as to provide an accurate unbiased basis for comparison and evaluation. This necessitates a uniform deadline by which a student must take an exam after that exam was originally administered to receive credit for a course, as well as limits on the time period over which an exam can be administered. We do not extend the time to take an examination beyond this deadline.
Second, we have a single grading system that applies uniformly to all our students. Accordingly, we do not allow or make changes to the grading criteria for a particular student.
Third, exams test different competencies, which require different formats for testing. Faculty therefore have discretion within the suite of options Harvard Law School makes available to choose the exam (or other evaluation) format or formats that best suits their course material and their pedagogical goals, but it is important that all students within a given class be given the same measure of evaluation.
More details on all our academic policies can be found in the Handbook of Academic Policies.
We are excited to welcome you to Harvard Law School. For generations we have educated the leaders in law. We aim for an educational environment that is exciting, enriching, but also rigorous. We hope it will be for you.