It’s the most wonderful time of year.
Bookbagging has started, and with it comes a whole host of exciting revelations. Our majors! Our futures! Our jobs! All decided by a single semester of four to six classes.
It’s the cause of endless distraction, procrastination and, well, drama. After all, the outcome of these classes will determine whether we live in a box in 10 years, or in a huge mansion with fountains and gardens in Beverly Hills. It’s a big deal.
Add to that an early second crop of midterms and the eternal Halloween costume dilemma (I might need to break out Indira Gandhi again, for the fourth time, just because it’s so easy), and you’ve got a whole lot of stress. Even for a pre-med like myself, with essentially their entire future planned out, times are getting rough. Who knew that picking out a biology class could be so difficult?
In my multiple semesters of bookbagging, I’ve managed to find a solution, sort of. Bookbag everything! And by everything, I mean actually everything. Seriously. That way, when all the classes you want are taken (as they invariably will be), you’ll still have an array of options, including some classes you would actually want to take. So you take those. Problem solved! It’s a breeze.
Okay, fine—that’s not the real problem here. I’ve bookbagged 20 biology classes before without breaking a sweat. And I didn’t even end up taking a bio course that semester, other than an independent study. Still, it was easy. Handy-dandy ACES even alphabetized my selections for me!
I kid. ACES is actually not at all handy-dandy. And neither are any of the other schedule-planning resources we have. We’re never properly informed about the courses that play such a central role in shaping our futures and diversifying our liberal arts education. Perhaps that is why bookbagging is so stressful.
We have essentially five resources to plan our schedules and courseloads: ACES and Schedulator for logistics, as well as course evaluations, CourseRank and ratemyprofessor.com for quality. And all of them have significant problems.
Take ACES. You can make schedules, but you can’t save them. You have to continually refresh your bookbag to make novel combinations, while somehow remembering what you had before. Schedulator solves this problem, at least sort of—it lets you bookbag, save multiple courses, easily browse through potential schedules and share your results.
Of course, when you actually register, you have to go through ACES. You must click through three pages in order to enroll in a course—which just seems tedious. And even if you’re okay with that, there are other hoops to jump through. Somehow, even if you click the enroll button just as the clock strikes 7:00 a.m., during the time it takes ACES to load your final schedule, the classes you want fill up. We’re all using the same Duke Wi-Fi connection—so what’s the problem? Clearly the system doesn’t work as well as it should.
Now, let’s bring in the question of quality. The fact is, course evals are simply not effective. Plenty of bad classes have ratings above a four out of five, and plenty of great classes have ratings below a four out of five. Duke students are a diverse bunch, and an average rating cannot represent our very qualitative experiences in a course. Plus, isn’t there a space to write comments on those forms? Why can’t we access those? I trust that many of you painstakingly fill those out, and I would like to see your thoughts. Moreover, the system doesn’t show you the most relevant course evals: the ones from the previous semester the course was offered. Wouldn’t that provide the most accurate assessment of a class? Simply put, course evals do not tell us nearly enough.
CourseRank and ratemyprofessor solve these problems, sort of. But they are far too underutilized, and do not provide us an accurate gauge. Like I said before, Duke students are a diverse bunch, and I’ve seen too many teachers listed as “great” who actually prove to be insufferable and unwilling to engage in discussion. Likewise, I’ve seen too many teachers dismissed as “too hard” who prove to be incredibly helpful and invested in students’ learning. The same goes for the courses themselves. The fact remains that the people who post on these sites document extreme experiences, both the great and the abysmal. As a result, we don’t get an accurate picture of the average Duke student’s experience.
It boils down to this: Our registration system needs some improvements and existing resources need to be utilized by more students and faculty. Since we can’t take the process seriously, it becomes difficult to take our courses themselves seriously. And then our majors! And our futures!
Indu Ramesh is a Trinity junior. Her column runs every other Wednesday.
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