Executive LLM in Tax

Courses

The Executive LLM in Taxation requires 24 credits of study, 20 of which must be in advanced tax courses taken through NYU. "Advanced tax courses" are any tax courses at NYU excepting Income Taxation, Survey of Securities Regulation, and Survey of Income Tax. Many, but not all of our tax classes are offered online. Feel free to contact us if you have a question about whether a specific course will be offered online. All 24 credits of coursework required for the Executive LLM in Taxation may be completed through online study, which is not the case with our other degree programs. The only specific requirement is that students must take a course in tax procedure. Several courses meet this requirement, including Survey of Tax Procedure (1 credit), Tax Procedure (2 credits), and Tax Penalties and Prosecutions (2 credits). Students can petition to waive this requirement if they have already taken a procedure course or participated in a tax clinic in their JD program. (When this requirement is waived, students must still complete 24 credits.)

Each online course is built upon the traditional Graduate Tax Program course materials, Professors, and a course website, just as we use for our on-campus courses. 

As the course begins, our Audio/Visual staff video tape class sessions and then post the recording onto the course web site. Students with access to the videos may watch the videos at any time, and may watch them repeatedly. We track viewings of these classes on our servers for all students enrolled in an online section of a class, and typically measure online "attendance" at two points in the semester. These viewing deadlines are posted at the beginning of the semester. Although it is within the Professor's discretion, most professors make the class videos available to students enrolled in both the traditional, 'live' section as well as the online section. These courses are internally referred to as "Combined" courses because from the perspective of a Professor, the student populations are combined. All students take the same exam and are graded on the same grading curve.

The following semester, when the Professor may not typically teach the same course on-campus, the course website with the video recordings are made available again. The Professor who originally taught the course inspects the materials, both written and visual, to make sure that they reflect current law and are pedagogically sound. We refer to these courses internally as "Online" courses because they do not have a corresponding live section.

Finally, it is common that a Professor will teach the same course the following year to a live group of students. When we cannot re-record this course, the Professor who is once again reviewing and revising materials for that semester will inspect the materials for pedagogical soundness. The live course and the online course are functional equivalents of one another. Again, students in both sections again take the same final exam and are graded on the same curve. Our experience shows that both populations perform comparably. We refer to these courses as "Parallel" courses. Typically the same books and problem sets are used in each offering of these courses, so there is no significant difference in the substance that is covered. Many part-time students prefer courses in either the online or parallel format as the videos are all immediately available, in case they wish to front-load their learning around deadlines or travel plans later in the semester. Additionally, students have reported encountering issues in their work which they were better able to handle because they could skip forward to relevant class lecture on that topic.