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Re: Syllabi - from Jon Bell



Someone said a little while ago that "syllabi are legal contracts", or
something to that effect. Does that mean that someday we're going to
have to have our syllabi approved by college legal staff before

Yup. Syllabi are a legal requirement in the last three US Universities I
have worked at. Syllabi are contracts like plans of study are -- they
are required to be in place early in a program (first n weeks of class), and
must contain many specific items. Appendix E of my NAU Faculty HandBook
(which my dept head required a signed statement that I read, understood and
agreed to comply with at the start of my current job) lists 10 major and 14
minor categories of syllabi contents.

While the syllabi aren't vetted by lawyers routinely, they will be thoroughly
vetted (possibly by lawyers) come your first grade challenge/appeal WHICH
YOU WILL PROBABLY LOSE if the syllabus is incomplete regarding grading.
Certainly App E of my handbook of NAU bureaucratese was lawyer-processed.

I wind up treating syllabi and plans of study as contracts for my own safety --
if you do these things under these conditions you wil get such a grade.

Grim, eh? And you though ambulance-chasing was distasteful; how does report
card chasing strike you?

Dan M

Dan MacIsaac, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Northern AZ Univ
danmac@nau.edu http://www.phy.nau.edu/~danmac/homepage.html


On Sat, 7 Dec 1996, Jon Bell wrote:

Someone said a little while ago that "syllabi are legal contracts", or
something to that effect. Does that mean that someday we're going to
have to have our syllabi approved by college legal staff before
publishing them? Whatever happened to common sense?

My guess is that "common" sense isn't all that common, really, and
that the requisite "legalese" (sp?) makes it so.

Allen Brown