As somebody who is currently pursuing a Master of Law degree at the University of Zurich, I would recommend that all prospective law students think twice before selecting UZH.


I would especially suggest that you do NOT go to UZH if:


1) You are neither a German speaker nor a German language student. As of Autumn 2021, this cannot be considered a bilingual university. Every now and then you will find untranslated information on the IT services;


2) You are used to university buildings and libraries offering fee-paying students a good number of workstations with up-to-date computers and a relatively peaceful and spacious environment;


3) You believe a faculty of law should come with its own campus rather than being a collection of inconspicuous buildings that are somewhat close to each other without actually sharing an address;


4) When having a look at their official website, you think there is something wrong with it looking like a Wordpad file, almost completely devoid of images and modern web design;


5) You are unsettled by the idea of a high cost of life which is not necessarily compensated by an above-average quality of life. Switzerland is not the land of bargains, no matter the context;


6) You think there is something wrong with staff asking for feedback for their courses before exams have taken the place, but not after;


7) You think that in 2021, a university should have a unified student portal offering at once information about the courses, the procedure to sign up for them and the relevant material for students who have signed up (currently, these three types of content are handled by three different websites).


I would not be able to tell you whether all public universities in Switzerland are similarly disappointing. What I do know is that my opinion of this country has been severely impacted by my negative experience with this university. The only silver lining is that I now understand how good the quality of my previous studies was in comparison.

[Edited by Carlyle95 on Dec 06, 2021]

Just in case you assumed that my review was based on the spurt of the moment, I would like to stress that I stand by everything I said a few months ago.
While I am at it, I would like to add that:

1) There is no specific place where to find details on oral exams, and guidelines for written exams are often drafted imprecisely and interpreted in a paranoid way. E.g., *underlining* words in permitted text aids may be allowed in a specific exam, but *circling* words could still qualify as cheating, even if the guidelines say that "markings" are allowed. I wish I were making this up.

2) There is, similarly, virtually no publicly available information on what happens should you fail any exam. The reasons for this lack of transparency are beyond me.

3) A student writing their thesis on an individual basis gets virtually no supervision from their so-called supervisor, only the outline and the final version are reviewed. It is very rare for students to interact directly with professors, as normally you speak to them through their assistants. I have every reason to believe that this custom contributes to the formation of an ivory-tower mentality, which is in turn reflected in the way modules, exams and thesis tracks are organised by said professors.

4) If you have any issue at all with the way your thesis was reviewed (and there are bound to be some when a single professor is in charge of correcting it) you have absolutely no appeal or feedback mechanism, no matter how many unclear, ambiguous, plainly wrong or goofy-sounding remarks your final evaluation report contains. Writing this comment on LLM-Guide.com (or on a Facebook student group, or in a WhatsApp group chat) is the closest thing to a post-evaluation feedback mechanism that I have as a degree-seeking student at UZH. Let that sink in

5) In most written exams, students are supposed to print out their own exam sheets or they cannot take the test. Where exactly is that one billion and a half of Swiss Francs that, according to Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Zurich ) UZH formally receives as funding? Between the missing exam paper, the web design that would have looked outdated in 2008, the scarcity of decent computer workstations and a few more details, I am pretty much compelled to believe that there is some embezzlement at play here

[Edited by Carlyle95 on Jun 29, 2022]