STAFF EDIT: Make Guide more useful source

With registration beginning this weekend, students are scrambling to plan their schedules. In addition to using methods like eliminating any classes before noon or on Fridays or throwing darts at a list of classes, The Source Guide provides more meaningful information to decide between, say, Dead Sea Scrolls and Sociology of Time. However, the Guide could be a much more useful resource if it included more courses, came out earlier and had a better website design and more publicity.

The Guide is a great concept. The four-sentence descriptions in the Bulletin do little to actually describe classes and give no information about the professors, and even those are no longer available at 881 Commonwealth Avenue. The Guide includes much better summaries of what courses are about, taking information directly from syllabi along with valuable reading lists and breakdowns of grading criteria. The instructors are rated on enthusiasm, effectiveness, availability, fairness in grading and ability to stimulate interest, and the classes are rated on workload and difficulty. While this information is based on previous semesters, students can still get a fairly accurate idea of the class because most professors do not radically alter their courses each semester.

However, the Guide only rates about 600 classes and only ones in the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Engineering. Including more of the thousands of classes offered at Boston University would vastly improve the Guide’s usefulness, and the goal of putting up all the syllabi should provide even more information.

The work-study students and volunteers who put together the Guide should do more to encourage professors to pass out the surveys, as should each school and department, and the university itself. Getting more schools and professors to cooperate should not be difficult with so many benefits to participating. Having a detailed description of their classes on the web will help professors attract students who are legitimately interested in the courses and reduce the number of students who drop classes once they discover they were not what they expected. Having an idea of students’ opinions can also help schools decide what courses to add and assist professors in improving their courses.

Student interest certainly exists, demonstrated by the popularity of sites like RateMyProfessors.com, which includes ratings of far more BU professors 752, in fact all submitted directly by students. On the site, professors’ overall ratings are determined by averaging their helpfulness and clarity, with students also rating whether professors are easy or difficult graders, and even whether they are hot or not. Many of the professors have only been rated by one or two students, but College of Communication dean and COM 101 instructor Brent Baker has 55 ratings. Although this site uses much more subjective criteria that may be unduly influenced because students are more likely to rate a professor they disliked, it still provides information about many professors not included in the Guide.

The Guide is much more trustworthy since the rankings come from every student in class who filled out the survey the day it was passed around. With more publicity and classes included, students would definitely consult it when designing their schedules. BU should make it one of its featured links on its main website during registration and put it on the registration section of the Student Link. Getting the word out louder at pre-registration meetings and freshman orientations would also let more students know that such a resource even exists.

Following through on promises to revamp the website would also increase usefulness. For example, students must enter a semester whether they are searching by course name, college or professor. Making this parameter optional would allow students to easily find all classes offered by a professor regardless of semester offered and easily show whether a course not included in the most recent semester had been rated earlier.

Finally, the Guide could be much more helpful if it came out earlier. This semester, the Guide came out just a few days before registration began right on time for its usual schedule. By getting it out just one week earlier, it would be available during the heyday of schedule planning and students could consult it before meeting with advisors.

The Source Guide provides thorough and fairly reputable descriptions of professors and their courses. However, some improvements to coverage, publicity, timeliness and the website would give students much more guidance. Then the makers of the Guide can move on to grading professors’ looks.