At NSU, it can be difficult for undergraduate students to sign up for the courses they need, either because there’s a prerequisite requirement, the class isn’t taught during that semester, or the class curriculum has yet to be established.
This system desperately needs to be fixed. Faculty should be prepared to teach all of the courses required in the majors that it offers from the moment students arrive on campus to the moment they cross the stage, diploma in tow.
It is two weeks before the beginning of the semester and, like any other overzealous student I am sitting down with Course Wizard open and a list of my major requirements to begin drafting my four-year graduation plan. I even break out those rainbow highlighters I’ve been saving for this color-coding appropriate moment. So far, my plan is looking great. I am almost finished when I arrive at the section I have dedicated for junior year and wonder what classes I’m going to take.
How about … nothing? All of a sudden, it’s as if course wizard is declaring, “This course is only offered on the third trimester of the second blue moon at the beginning of the winter solstice.” So settle in for the long run because you’re going to be in college for a while and you’re going to spend most of that time paying to wait.
For many of the majors here at NSU, aside from the more popular ones like biology, there seems to come a time when finding a crucial course or two and getting it to fit into an already tight schedule is simply impossible.
This is a frustrating and hair-pulling moment for most students. What should be an exciting mid-semester race to see who gets to sign up for next semester’s courses has turned into a despairing search for class availability.
Although NSU is renowned for its graduate programs, administrators have taken steps to improve its undergraduate programs. In fact, a summit was held in October in which President George Hanbury discussed strategies for increasing the freshman retention rate and improving the overall undergraduate experience. Well, here’s a solution: give us the classes we desperately need and maybe we won’t be so quick to transfer to a different university.
On top of the lack of class availability is the ever-impending issue of course prerequisites. While students are generally accepting of the idea that they need prerequisites before enrolling in certain courses, these requirements aren’t okay to enforce when students need to take a course only taught in a specific semester.
For example, if you are an arts administration major, a core course may only be offered once less than every two years but what if, by unfortunate circumstances, you just missed the class when it’s offered because you needed to take a prerequisite? By the time you complete the prerequisite, you will have to wait for the class you need to take to cycle back around again. One misstep in calculating your class schedule or one course cancellation due to lack of student interest can have devastating consequences. Namely, it could land you another semester or even an additional year in academic limbo, something most of us don’t have the money or the patience for.
We aren’t in college to serve as guinea pigs to help an undergraduate program. We are here to learn and to do that we need our core courses. We aren’t dishing out tens of thousands of dollars a year to sit around and wait for someone to teach a class or for a rare class that comes around only during planetary alignment to show up again.
It’s understandable if elective classes aren’t always available but it is downright unacceptable and inexcusable for our core courses to be scheduled that way. The least academic administrators can do is get us the classes we need and when we need them, stat.
