If the Academic Efficiency and Effectiveness Task Force achieves its goals, class registration could get a major facelift.
The task force, headed by Provost Susan Martin, is tackling a number of issues that affect students as they sign up for courses, including reducing bottleneck classes, modifying class schedule making and incentivizing summer school.
Bottleneck courses, which are courses difficult for students to gain admission into, impede four-year graduation rates, which Interim President Jan Simek is pushing to improve.
Sally McMillan, associate dean for academic programs in the College of Communication and Information and one member of the nine-member task force, said looking at waitlists for classes this year shows part of the problem. Some students waitlist for three sections of the same class.
In order to achieve efficiency, McMillan said the university needs an accurate gauge for the demand for classes. But student drops distort the demand.
“They’re doing it just to make sure they can get a full schedule,” she said. “I know why students are doing it. It’s not that the students are bad. It’s that the system is bad.”
Modifying the course-drop policy could alleviate the problem. The task force is looking at statistics from peer institutions regarding the matter, Martin said.
“It is possible that we will recommend a limit to the number of courses that a student can drop after the drop and add deadline,” Martin said. “But this recommendation is not fully developed.”
While one answer could be hiring more lecturers for bottleneck classes, because of cost-saving purposes, McMillan said restructuring curriculum could improve the situation.
Mass dropping of courses after the first day, due to not obtaining the prerequisites for the class, is another obstacle to class registration. Martin said BANNER, the student information system, provides a possible solution with automatic prerequisite checking, which would immediately identify whether a student is ready to take the course.
“Students would not be allowed to register for courses if they have not completed the prerequisites,” Martin said. “Currently prerequisites are checked manually. This is inefficient.”
Summer school can alleviate the pressure of obtaining all course-hour credit to graduate in four years, but with the lack of the HOPE Scholarship and reduced course offerings over the summer, it’s not the most popular of options at UT.
“Summer school here used to be much bigger than it is,” McMillan said. “The drop in summer school relates directly to the HOPE Scholarship. Once we had the scholarship and it didn’t pay for summer school, it just shrank dramatically.”
One advocate of using the HOPE Scholarship for summer school is Drew Webb, senior in political science and another task force member. He said, without taking at least one summer of classes, graduating on time can be hard.
“Why should it matter how we use the HOPE Scholarship, whether we choose to use it during the school year or the summer, as long as we don’t go over the maximum number of allowable hours?” he said.
Martin said having to take more than four years, rather than taking summer school, can hurt students economically as well.
“From the perspective of the cost of a fifth year and the lost opportunity involved in not entering the work force in the fifth year, students could have much to gain by being able to take more courses in the summer using the HOPE Scholarship,” she said.
Student demand for when they take classes throughout the week is also lopsided, McMillan said, with many wanting classes between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
She said students shy away from Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes because of having to attend on Fridays. The institution of more Monday-Wednesday classes could level demand, but the way the system is currently set up disallows this.
While Martin believes the university should always seek efficiencies, she said beginning the process now is to prepare for when the university’s federal stimulus money runs out in less than two years.
McMillan said facing this reality makes the process of correcting inefficiencies all the more important.
“It’s always good to look at improving efficiency, but when you know that two years from now or more like 18 months from now we’re going to have a lot less money, we have to figure out how to prepare for that,” she said.