FAQ for LLM Offer-holders 2020

We are not able to consider applications to modify or waive academic conditions until after you have received your degree result. Cambridge is far from alone in having substantially revised its grading conventions this year, in light of the global situation, and we anticipate that many of your institutions will have made similar adaptations and have mitigation committees in place to which students particularly badly affected can appeal to have their grade adjusted in light of their personal circumstances. So, please await your degree results and, if you have missed your academic condition, use your local procedures to appeal (if available and appropriate to you) before approaching us to request a waiver. If your university has adopted a simple pass/fail or other approach that means you simply cannot produce an academic result of the sort expected, follow the instructions in the University’s FAQ for what to do if you are in this situation.

The University has confirmed that the term dates will be as normal. That said, those of you coming from overseas will need to bear in mind the possibility of having to comply with quarantine requirements on arrival in the UK (the rules on this, of course, may change in light of developing circumstances).

As the University has said, we will be doing all we reasonably can to meet the needs of students whose individual circumstances mean that they cannot attend any in-person teaching. We are awaiting clarification of the extent to which the University will permit entirely remote participation in programmes such as the LLM. However, we are putting in place plans that should enable us to deliver interactive teaching in as many papers as possible online at times of day that work for a wide range of global time-zones. We will share further information about our plans in this regard as soon as we can. If, however, you do anticipate that you are likely to want to take part in the LLM programme remotely for some or all of the academic year, there are some basic IT and practical arrangements which we would recommend to help ensure an effective learning experience, as follows:

• A quiet space in which to work that offers privacy and a comfortable working surface. Headphones may be useful to cut out any background noise.
• A stable broadband internet connection that you can ensure is not congested at times of teaching by the online activities of other members of your household. As a benchmark, the UK Government considers ‘decent’ broadband to be 10Mbps download / 1Mbps upload; anything below this could result in degraded and so unsatisfying teaching and learning experience. You can check your broadband service’s speed for both download and upload using https://www.speedtest.net/
• A Windows 10 or Mac (Mac OS 10.10 or later) desktop or laptop computer. We are recommending this specification as these are the oldest operating systems on which Microsoft Teams (which we are using for much of our teaching) will run.
• And lastly, so you can participate fully and satisfactorily in any interactive teaching sessions conducted online, a decent webcam (either built-in to your computer, or external) and a decent microphone (ideally integral to headphones or webcam).