Registration time for the spring of 2018 is nearing, and while students are getting excited about getting one step closer to graduation, how many students have ever stopped to think about how the university manages to keep track of all those classes?
There are a lot of numbers to keep track of in the academic world, and there is a process that determines when and where each course is scheduled.
Holly Teal in the registrar’s office explained the steps of this process. When an academic department decides they want to offer a new class, that class goes through a curriculum process, which begins with a proposal that needs approval by Academic Affairs.
The proposal includes details like the number of credits the class will be worth. Once approved, it moves on to the faculty senate and finally to the board of trustees for approval as an offered course.
As far as scheduling is concerned, when the schedule for a given semester is presented by the registrars to the departments, they can modify whatever they need to in order to make the course work.
For example, they could switch out professors, or even move a class from 9:00 a.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to 2:00 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The departments then submits that info back to the registrar’s office, and the registrar’s office inputs it into the computer system.
Another aspect the registrar’s office has to take into consideration is finals week, which has a different schedule than the rest of the semester.
Finals week can be a crazy week on campus. To help calm the hustle and bustle and to give students more time to prepare for finals, the week’s schedule is modified so each class gets a two-hour block for their final.
“That has been a schedule that has been the same since the 90’s,” Teal said. “It has always been that grid that you see. Every semester, basically all we do is just change the dates on it because the time grid stays exactly the same.”
The current system seems to be working for students, but the registrars are always open to suggestions on how the finals week schedule can be improved.
Another important aspect of schedule creation is class location.
“The department gets us the days and times for their classes, and if it happens to go in a general classroom, one of the things that’s important to the institution is that we optimize use of space on campus. So, the larger classes get the larger rooms,” Teal said.
There is a software product that assigns classes to rooms. For example, a math class needs more whiteboard space for writing out equations, so they are usually placed in rooms with lots of whiteboard space in buildings like Houston Hall or Escalante Hall. Through consultations with Academic Affairs department heads decide how many students can be in a class.
It is also up to the department heads to decide which teachers get to teach which class.
Dr. Calvin Hofer, head of the music department, said it is mostly based on a teacher’s interest. “[They] maybe ask to teach a course that isn’t their area, but they’re interested in doing it, so they do it,” Hofer said.
Dr. Thomas Acker, a professor of Spanish, added, “It varies from department to department. Ideally, we identify someone who is, number one, interested in the subject, [and] has training in the subject.”
Although students only see the end of the process when class times become available on MavZone, a lot of work and consideration goes into the process before a class is even offered to them.
