Law Students Have Trouble Viewing Grades

While checking final grades may be stressful enough, Harvard Law School students were forced to endure additional hours of anxiety due a system error with the Law School’s grade viewing portal.

As hundreds of law students logged on last week to check their grade reports, they had to wait several hours before accessing their final marks, resulting in “inevitable frustration,” according to an e-mail released by the Law School registrar’s office.

MyGrades, the Law School’s online grade viewing system, uses a waiting list to determine the order in which students view their final marks, according to second-year law student Kenneth D. Basin.

He added that students were sometimes bumped from their spots on the waiting list and were sent to the back of a line that, at times, was over 300 people long.

“In my case, the system was so slow that I had to log in so many times that it locked me out,” Basin said. “When one problem ended, another began.”

The incident prompted Dean of the Law School Elena Kagan to send an e-mail to the affected students in which she dubbed the incident a “fiasco” and sought to “personally apologize for the failure.”

Kagan is currently one of the leading candidates in the University’s search for its 28th president.

“The way in which the system worked on Tuesday was unacceptable—for any educational institution, let alone for Harvard,” Kagan wrote. “Tuesday’s grade-viewing demonstrated continuing serious problems in the system, which will not be easy to remedy.”

According to Assistant Dean for Communications Michael A. Armini, the grade viewing problems revealed the system’s greater limitations.

“Our student information system is not meeting our expectations—not even close,” he wrote.

Many students who could not access their grade reports online also were barred from checking their grades by phone due to privacy concerns, according to the registrar’s office.

According to Basin, the Law School also experienced difficulties earlier this semester with online course selection and the new e-mail server.

“I went to [the University of Southern California], and we had an electronic situation in place for 25,000 students that was far more effective then what the law school has for 1,500 students,” Basin said.

Kagan­—who made improving student life a top priority when she became dean in 2003—announced that she would continue to work to remedy the problem.

“I can promise to treat this matter as a key priority and to ensure that our staff turns over every rock and explores every avenue to make grade-viewing online work appropriately,” she wrote.

­­—Staff writer Kevin Zhou can be reached at kzhou@fas.harvard.edu.