abaculus

This little gem of a site is one of my essential tools in course-planning. Oh, making sure your courses all fit into one schedule is important, of course, but I enjoy putting in the extra effort of choosing hopefully good profs and still making a schedule that fits. It takes more time, but it’s well worth the effort to actually enjoy going to class for three or four months, I think.

The website is not the first thing I look at, though. The first thing I do when planning my schedule is to select the classes I want which only have one course offering (in my case, Chinese). Obvious statement, perhaps, but it’s good to see what slots are definitely going to be filled on my worklist. (I also have this craving for two hour lunch breaks whenever possible.)

Then I look at my requirements for English or for whatever subjects I want to do, and look at the courses to see which meet those requirements. Often there are multiple courses, let alone multiple course offerings, to pick from. And here is where the website comes in.

Look for course that fits time, look up prof. Only the smiley faces make it to the list. If there are multiple smiley faces, I read the comments. A lot of students like the professors who will give easy marks, which isn’t what I’m looking for. Many say, “It’s too hard!” and I wonder if it’s really too hard or if it’s all relative to how hard someone’s willing to work. We’re all looking for slightly different experiences, after all. But the other thing I like to do is to select the professor with the smiley face and lots of ratings: I’ll probably pick the good professor with 70 ratings as opposed to the good professor with 10. Mathematically speaking, the higher the total rating, the less impact the anomalies have upon said total rating. Therefore, more ratings = more likely to really be good. Interestingly enough, all the professors other students have recommended to me thus far have many happy golden faced ratings.

But I think it’s a good thing to keep in mind that this site is by no means the be all and end all of course-planning. In fact, I think it would be remarkably silly to expect that your professor will be good simply because they have a good rating on the site. You can hope that they’re good, but it’s not a guarantee. Using this site simply ups the odds in your favour of getting a good prof, as opposed to taking any old course that fits into your timetable. In addition, I have the luxury of picking profs because I study subjects that have enormous departments, so I can choose. Sometimes there isn’t a choice, and when there isn’t, there isn’t any point in griping about it either.

Another thing to note is that when I talk about good profs, I mean they are professors who really challenge your thinking and who will really make you work hard — but not ridiculously so. At least, I don’t think it ridiculous: I usually take a while to work out a way in which to manage my time and my readings, but by the end of term, I’m managing just fine. And I personally think that the point of making your own timetable is to do classes you are interested in and in which you will learn a lot. I don’t belong to the school of thought that calls for choosing only classes that will boost your GPA, though I understand why it’s nice to have those classes sometimes. (I think one “easy” class per term is quite the limit for me, though I had a very happy term last term without any at all.)

But alas! Professors can’t choose their students, the poor dears.