Registration is a pain.
Students spend a week crafting the perfect schedule, lining up their classes with precision and careful preparation, only to have it destroyed by a last-minute change in staff or a ruthless adviser.
Students go into advisement with high hopes and planned homework and exercise breaks, only to find out they have another required course they’re supposed to take next semester.
Students take their laptops to class, watch as their timers tick down to the last second, refresh the page like maniacs and still lose to the Registrar.
Then there’s the dreaded waitlist; do you risk it? Do you hope that the professors didn’t put the real student cap limit on Webster?
It’s all a necessary evil, right?
But does it have to be?
Discussed on this Scout’s stories on registration on pages A4 and A5 is a section about the many ways different departments help their students graduate on time. Whether it’s the Foster college’s checklists or engineering’s flowcharts, these measures are put into place to ensure that graduation requirements are met in the right order by the right time.
We want to see more of these preemptive efforts. While many students want to retain their freedom to choose whatever courses they like, it’s important to know what classes must be taken and in what order.
With the new prerequisite policy, students cannot take a prerequisite for a course and the actual course at the same time. Considering this is the actual definition of the word “prerequisite,” the policy makes sense.
However, when students are not made explicitly aware of prerequisites and mandatory courses at the beginning of their time in a specific department, they may be forced to stay at Bradley longer or load up a specific semester.
The matter gets increasingly difficult when students consider that some courses are only offered in the spring or fall, or worse, when the four-semester program has already started, like some foreign languages.
There needs to be more transparency and a better understanding of major requirements by advisers and students alike, but because the programs change every year, this seems impossible.
Should faculty members expect that freshmen will enroll in Bradley and plan out their next four years without a moment’s hesitation?
Should students be accountable for that?
We can’t say either way.
But what we can say is that nobody likes to pay for a senior year victory lap.
