Puvali Chatterjee: Registrar’s Office course descriptions should be more thorough

Picture yourself: It’s 2 a.m. in the middle of winter quarter, and your nerves are as mushy as the banana from Bruin Plate you forgot in your bag yesterday. Cup of coffee in hand, you blankly stare at 10 tabs of course descriptions on your laptop. Comprehension deserts you, and your MyUCLA class planner is empty.

So much for academic proactivity.

Students get their first glimpse of their future courses through course descriptions, which are approved by the UCLA Academic Senate and managed by the Registrar’s Office. Course descriptions often consist of a few vague sentences that state the main topics covered in the class, but not much else.

These descriptions are hardly helpful to students, many of whom like to prepare for upcoming classes in advance. Although some professors include course syllabuses in advance on CCLE, general descriptions tend to remain the only piece of information about a class until the first lecture.

Lack of details or inadequate information about a course can deter students from taking the class itself. After all, most students consider it safer to enroll in a well-described class than take a shot in the dark and enroll in a course with no knowledge of what it will entail in terms of content and workload.

Academic departments can improve the process of enrolling in classes by including more useful information in course descriptions, such as a general overview of course topics, methods of evaluation and tentative midterm examination dates. Posting detailed and unambiguous descriptions of courses can help reduce students’ anxiety as they enroll in their classes, especially for those who get stuck in long waitlists, or prioritize among different courses to satisfy requirements for their majors or minors.

Emily Tehrani, a third-year computer science student, said she believes the brief descriptions of classes currently on the Registrar’s Office website are often too vague to estimate the level of difficulty of a particular class. She added the blandness of the descriptions also make it hard to decide whether the topics covered will interest her.

During her first year, Tehrani had to drop a class because she had to attend a personal event that conflicted with her midterm, which comprised 30 percent of her grade for the class. Had she known the midterm dates beforehand, she would not have had to scramble to find a replacement class after the quarter already started, she said.

One solution to the insufficiency of information provided prior to enrollment would be for departments or instructors to use CCLE’s syllabus preview feature to post tentative syllabuses online before the enrollment periods. However, this would not work in every case because faculty often do not finalize syllabuses for the next quarter by the enrollment period.

Eric Wells, the committee analyst for the Undergraduate Council in the Academic Senate, said professors constantly revise course materials, meaning any syllabuses posted before enrollment would be outdated by the time the new quarter began. He added it would not be possible for guest lecturers and visiting scholars to submit course materials before beginning their contracts with the university at the start of the term.

Additionally, Wells said syllabuses are the intellectual property of instructors, many of whom might not want to make them available to students who are not yet enrolled in their classes.

Wells suggested that students can contact individual instructors or the academic counselors in each department to obtain syllabuses before the start of a course, but that is not feasible for classes with more than 100 students. Also, it’s not likely that every student who is unsure about enrolling in a class would want to approach the instructor and ask for a tentative syllabus so far in advance.

Some professors might even be unwilling to provide syllabuses to students early on. Hughlin Boyd, an English composition instructor, said he believes too much information can prematurely skew students’ opinions of what a course will be like. He added the road map of a course that is provided by instructors on the first day of class is not necessarily captured by the course syllabus.

Boyd, however, believes it is essential that course descriptions offer overviews of their courses’ subject matters and explain what is expected from students.

Better course descriptions are the best recourse for students who have trouble deciding which classes they want to take. Departments must take the initiative to feature more detailed course descriptions on the Registrar’s Office’s website with as much relevant academic and administrative course information as possible to ensure that enrollment periods do not translate to bemusement and stress for students.

Improving course descriptions will no doubt be a tedious process for departments and instructors. But the end result – easier, stress-free class enrollment for students – is worth it. When students of a world-class university struggle with something as academically essential as picking classes to enroll in, the system is clearly due for an upgrade.

Clinical, detached sentences about a course’s technical concepts mean nothing to students who haven’t yet learned the terminology used in the class. Students deserve more than to have to plan their courses armed with only a vague, abstract idea of what they will look like.