a.  A “credit hour” is an amount of work that reasonably approximates not less than one hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and two hours of out-of-class student work per week for 15 weeks (including one week for final exams) or the equivalent amount of work over a different amount of time.

b.  Every credit-bearing enterprise shall have a designated number of credit hours. For each credit hour, students must be assigned a minimum of 42.5 hours per credit. These assignments are presumptively allocated between 15 50-minute “hours” in class (including time spent taking any exams) and 30 60-minute hours outside of class (including time spent on course readings, written assignments, or preparing presentations). For credit-bearing enterprises that do not involve regular class meetings (such as independent study or co-curricular enterprises), students must be assigned an equivalent amount of work time. With the exception of such enterprises, the Vice Dean will generally not make a designation that requires fewer than 700 minutes of classroom time per credit hour.

c.  The Vice Dean or his/her designee will review syllabi prior to the semester in which a course is taught to ensure that it meets the Credit Hour Policy and will work with faculty to ensure compliance. Once a course has been approved, future reviews of syllabi for the same course will occur periodically. Faculty proposals to teach new courses should include a short justification for the number of credits sought by providing a short description of the amount of out-of-class work, as well as the time to be spent in class sessions. The Vice Dean or his/her designee will require that all clinic and field clinic students either log weekly clinical fieldwork hours, have set field work office hour requirements that are minimally sufficient to demonstrate compliance with the law school credit hour policy, or attend regular supervisory meetings at which they are required to demonstrate to faculty their compliance with the law school credit hour policy.