As you might have been informed, Saarland University has been closed today as a response to the pandemic. Parts of the official message from the University President are copied below.

With this note, we would like to inform you about how the closing affects exams and ongoing courses.

• Classroom teaching and study will not take place until 04 May 2020 in order to counteract the further spread of the coronavirus. If you participate in an ongoing course or seminar offered by the Computer Science department, your instructor will inform you whether the course will transition to an online format.
• Examinations that require the student’s attendance at the university will not take place at least until 24 April 2020. This implies that all written exams will be postponed to a later date. In due time, the instructors of courses with postponed exams will contact their students with updates on re-scheduling of the exam.
• In urgent individual cases, the examiners may decide in agreement with the students concerned whether an oral examination may be conducted via video conference. Please contact the instructor of a given course if your individual case does not allow you to wait for the results of an exam that is re-scheduled at a date after 24 April.
• The processing times of ongoing qualification papers (such as term papers, Bachelor’s thesis, Master’s thesis, state examination thesis) will be adjusted. I.e., your deadline for submission of your thesis will be postponed according to the closing period. If you want to submit a thesis during the closing, please send an electronic version in PDF format to Mrs. Karin Jostock (bioinformatics examination office). You will have to hand in the written copies, following the usual procedure, after re-opening of the university.

Regarding the upcoming summer semester, we have the following important information for you:

• The start of courses has been postponed to Monday, May 4th.
• We expect that the typical courses will be offered as during a regular summer semester. Courses might be offered using online formats, rather than in a presence mode, at least during the first weeks of the new semester.
• In response to the delayed start of the course time, instructors might offer online materials before May 4th that you can use for preparation while the university is closed. If so, you can find these materials on the course’s web page that is linked through LSF.
• As of now, we expect that exams for courses in the summer semester will be scheduled at the usual periods during the summer term break.
• We are aware of the problems that the current situation is generating for incoming international students. We are working on a solution for freshmen enrolment. In any case, the date for enrolment will be shifted to a suitable date around the semester start (May 4). In case of questions, new students should contact Mrs. Kerstin Gronow-Pudelek, kerstin.gronow-p@bioinformatik.uni-saarland.de
• They may also also directly contact the Studierendensekretariat or Welcome Center:
  https://www.uni-saarland.de/studium/beratung/studierendensekretariat.html (German only)
  https://www.uni-saarland.de/en/global/welcome-center.html (in English)
• But it is foreseeable that these offices will be heavily overloaded during the coming weeks.
• For further updates, please regularly check:
  – Corona-related updates of Saarland Informatics Campus: http://bit.ly/enCoronaSIC
  – Corona-related updates of Saarland University: https://www.uni-saarland.de/en/page/coronavirus.html
  – and information posted on webpages of courses that you took this winter semester or courses you plan to take in the summer semester.

Should you have questions, please always check these resources first! Otherwise please contact the course instructors or Mrs. Karin Jostock, jostock@bioinf.uni-sb.de via e-mail.

These are our commitments during the Covid 19 pandemic. By joining forces and acting calmly, informed and responsibly, we can contribute our share to slow down the spread of the virus. #FlattenTheCurve!