Law Schools

Law School Suffers Critical Computer Collapse In The Middle Of Finals

Students deserve a little leeway here.

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Close up view of burning laptopStoring materials in the Cloud is always a better idea right up until it isn’t. It saves on paper and provides innumerable security advantages, but if the system lacks the proper redundancies, the vagaries of modern computing can leave you staring at a bare cupboard in the middle of your law school finals. In that scenario, you would expect the law school to call a halt to everything while the situation got sorted out.

You’d expect this because you’re a reasonable person.

That’s not the way things played out at George Washington Law over the weekend where students took a break from being rightly embarrassed of Jonathan Turley to find class materials gone and no way to formally turn in take home exams:

GW’s website, housing all our class powerpoints, slides, syllabus, online readings etc is down…. The website has been down all day and we were initially told they were hoping to restore service by EOD. We are now without these crucial resources for the entire weekend and many of us (myself included) have exams Monday and can’t get access to basic class materials. Some of us also reached out to professors in the hopes of getting these materials and it sounds like the professors also can’t access the materials because they were stored on GW’s website (mylaw) which is down.

Another student posted on social media:

When GW law’s portal goes down in the MIDDLE of finals (and note, this is not the first time it’s gone down) and no one has access to any portal documents, course rosters, or course recordings…and you realize the inequities that exist (in addition to inequities more generally), especially between students who already submitted an exam v. those who have yet to start the very same exam (and will have access to different information). Then administration emails and says continue as planned and “please contact the Dean of Students Office, which will be able to explain the circumstances to the faculty member grading your exam without identifying you.” And you just think, “how can ANYONE account for this?”

This isn’t the first time GW’s suffered computer issues:

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Please note our OCI bidding website also went down a day or two before bidding closed. After a lot of back and forth, with the administration initially refusing to extend the OCI bidding deadline, they finally extended it. It seems every time the students need access to a website during a crucial time, the IT team at GW encounters issues keeping it running.

If this speculation is an accurate diagnosis it means the school expects student interest in class materials to remain flat and consistent throughout the semester which is… a bold assumption.

For its part, the school informed students that the site would be down throughout the weekend and that they should turn in their take home exams through Gmail, which elides the whole “no one has materials” issue… kind of a key point for an open-book take home.

Files such as PowerPoints that are stored on your course pages on my.law.gwu.edu are not available. If you need such files, you may attempt to contact the faculty member, so long as the exam has not already begun.

Except the above tip noted that professors can’t get at the documents either and, obviously, this is wholly useless if the student is mid-exam at the time.

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While we’ve not heard of last week’s LexisNexis outage — part of the AWS crash — fatally compromising anyone’s work, if that happened, courts would inevitably afford a little leeway. GW Law should follow that model.

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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