Tensions are at an all-time high as students approach the NYU bi-annual battle to the death that is course registration. Beyond the usual praying for class availability, the frantic back and forth checking of Albert’s course descriptions and disgruntled primary sources from Rate My Professors — which has exploded in popularity since its inception in 1999 with roughly 19 million reviews of 1.7 million professors — there is a great deal of uncertainty when it comes to choosing classes at NYU. There is also a very clear solution: Professors should have their syllabi ready by the time of course selection.
It’s impossible for the average student to grasp the nature of a course and the demand of their schedules until the first day of class when the professor goes over the syllabus for the first time. We’ve all heard the groans and uneasy shifting in a classroom during the reading of a particularly difficult one — only to come back to class the next week and see half the class has flown the coop.
41% of first-year and sophomore students at four-year institutions and first-year students in two-year programs choose to drop a class. Even with the costs associated — reentering the hunt for a replacement class amid extremely limited availabilities, risking failure to meet graduation requirements and trying to find class times that work with an internship or job schedule — many students drop classes anyway. Perhaps if students were better informed of what courses entailed before registering for them, fewer people would choose to leave at the start of the semester.
For those who enjoy exhaustively planning their schedules, knowing when big assignments are due and the timing of exams would be a major factor in whether a student chooses to take a course. When students are given the chance to space out these events ahead of time, as a strategic method to give ample attention to each upcoming exam or assignment, they are able to set themselves up for the best chance of academic success by not having to juggle impending deadlines for multiple classes within a short period of time.
It is sometimes possible to find syllabi for certain courses online already, but including them within the course registration process would create a more official channel for students, giving them more certainty that they’ve found the correct syllabus and saving the trouble it takes to hunt for one online.
Some may argue that school is supposed to teach students to manage time well in periods of unpredictably high workloads. However, it is also worth giving credit to the skills it takes to pre-plan a schedule that fulfills degree requirements and accounts for extracurriculars and work schedules while simultaneously choosing seemingly interesting courses. By attaching professors’ syllabi to each course, students are given the choice to be proactive and take their planning a step further.
In my own experience, exams have accounted for a large portion of the overall grade in some courses while others have avoided them entirely, substituting tests for essays or projects instead. Knowing the breakdown of grades beforehand may set students up for greater success, since, at this point in their academic careers, they know what type of work they excel at most.
Research has found that 10 to 35% of students suffer from testing anxiety to the point of functional impairment, which indicates that exams may not be every student’s optimal avenue to academic success. One would be justified in avoiding classes graded primarily on test scores, if they find they just don’t do that well on tests — others may prefer an exam to a lengthy essay or even, God forbid, a group project.
While it is important that education exerts some level of pressure onto students to incentivize them to perform well, it should not lead to debilitating levels of stress or feelings of hopelessness. Anxiety and depression are the leading mental health issues among students, but giving them more information on what each course entails may mitigate these growing issues.
When many students are already paying over $65,000 in just tuition, even textbooks can pose a financial burden on students at the beginning of the semester. By providing the syllabus, which lists all required reading materials — and shows whether the textbook is even necessary in the further breakdown of readings before each class — students will have the option to avoid courses that would represent a major financial inconvenience otherwise.
Pairing courses with a syllabus during course selection doesn’t seem like an unthinkable change, it just feels out of the ordinary to make requests for how professors teach their classes. It seems like good practice for professors to write their syllabi ahead of time — after all, some have taught the same course for decades with only minor changes to the structure of the class. With course registration already being a frazzling task for many, NYU should take additional steps to make it easier for students choosing next semester’s classes.
WSN’s Opinion section strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion section are solely the views of the writer.
Contact Serin Lee at [email protected].