mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (04/20/84)
Hey. I attended three different universities: the University of Southern California, UW-Madison, and Berkeley. I can categorically state that, when it comes to administrative procedures (such as registration), UW is by far the best I have ever seen. The registration process is (or at least was in 1978) amazingly well run. It's completely interactive. You walk around to the departments where you want classes, and if there is room, you are put on the list, your form is validated, and you're in. Right there. No waiting for weeks to see if you got in the class. No camping out overnight to get class cards. You can't start registering until you have your reg form, which you get on Monday if you're a senior or grad student, Tuesday for a Junior, etc. This gives priority to the upper class without anybody waiting in any long lines. One nice side effect of this is that people only register for the classes they want. None of this "well, I better register for my 5th and 6th choices in case I don't get one of my first 4" stuff. Overregistration fills up the class fast so that others can't get in. Then 1/2 of the students drop out, many because they got some other class they really wanted. When I went to UCB I was appalled at the registration process. I almost went out and bought a rubber stamp with my name, address, phone number, and whether this info could be given out; I must have had to fill that out on 20 separate cards and pieces of paper EACH QUARTER. Not to mention the fact that at UCB a TA must pay his fall tuition by the begining of August (classes start in late September) but his first paycheck doesn't come until November 1 (if somebody hasn't screwed that up, but that's another story). I mentioned how well run things were at UW. They said "well, sure, but UCB is a big school". Funny, UCB has 25,000 students. UW has 40,000. Mark
ken@ihuxq.UUCP (ken perlow) (04/20/84)
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As Mark Horton mentioned, the registration procedure is all on-line
and works well. As for resources, except for the semester I had
the dread 701 (advanced compilers) and had to use a VAX-750 in
contention with three other advanced courses, including an image-
processing class, things went pretty smoothly. (Why such intensive
floating-point crunching was done on a non-hardware FP machine I'll
never know. They called it the "slovax", later, the "yoyovax".)
The terminal reservation procedure was also automated, and thus
quite fair. MS, 1983.
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JE MAINTIENDRAI ***** *****
****** ****** 19 Apr 84 [30 Germinal An CXCII]
ken perlow ***** *****
(312)979-7261 ** ** ** **
..ihnp4!ihuxq!ken *** ***ericf@uwvax.ARPA (04/21/84)
I also must say that the registration procedure at UW-Madison is pretty
poor, for undergradutes. From what I understand, they have to plan
battle strategy in order to maximize their chances for getting into
their classes, especially if two departments are on opposite sides of
the campus. They even have buses to truck students around from one
assignment committee to another. Does this sound like a good way to do
things? I don't think so.
I was an undergrad at Cornell Univ., and they had a computerized
system that I thought worked quite well. Near the end of the semester,
you made up your schedule FOR THE NEXT SEMESTER, and submitted it to
the college office. No muss, no fuss, no rush. At registration, you
found out what courses you got. Only if you didn't get into a
particular course did you have to go to the various departments to
add/drop courses for the semester, and this was facilitated by the
"Grand Course Exchange", where most departments were represented in one
place, so you didn't have to do running around to sort out your
schedule. The individual departments decided who got into each course,
based on the lists from the "pre-registration" forms filled out for
that semester, so each course had its criteria for enrollment (year,
major, etc.). This worked out quite well, I thought, and a lot
easier on the students. Do they still do things this way at Cornell?
For what it's worth,
Eric Feigenson, UW Madison
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-Eric Feigenson
Usenet: ...harpo!seismo!uwvax!ericf
{allegra, ihnp4}!uwvax!ericf
Arpanet: ericf@uwvaxbhilden@druxj.UUCP (04/25/84)
At the risk of having my fellow colleagues and professors flame me
to death, I graduated from UW-Madison in December 1983 with a MS
in CS and thought I would through in my two cents about life in
Madtown.
First off, it seems like the situation is improving at UW but in
many aspects of the program, that was the only way things could
go.
Concerning the teaching situation, UW is hurting for faculty in
almost all disciplines except theory(they are developing
a strong program) which has several implications. First, many
of the undergraduate courses are taught by TA`s and lecturers,
though this may be a blessing in disguise as some faculty members
won`t give students the time of day outside of class and office
hours. Secondly, many of the faculty teach the same course
each year leading to motivational problems(i.e. "here we go again").
A very real problem at UW is the method for registering for CS
courses, which for the most part is not restricted to majors
only(some funky University rule). Many non majors would like
to get a few CS courses under their belt and onto their resumes
and it is these persons(Seniors and Juniors) who fill up the
courses. The department does hold some sections open for
Sophomores and Freshman but, the problem does exist.
Incidentally, the drop rate in undergraduate CS courses is quite
high at 30-40%, though our department wisely chooses not to
over enroll courses(enrollment is determined by available
machine time). One method I have heard to curtail the high
drop rate(in use at UW EE dept) is to keep waiting lists for
courses and if a student drops, he/she goes to the end
of the waiting list. This could have grave consequences for
a senior.
One bright spot at UW is the Department Administrator who performs
teaching evaluations of his graduate instructors to determine who
is qualified, and then assigns them courses they are qualified
to teach.
Concerning machine availability I have mixed feelings. The
department has a number of teaching machines pdp 11/70(the ratio of
uptime to downtime), vax 11/750, vax 11/780, hp 3000, IBM 4341 and
various research machines( ~2 11/780, ~6 11/750 + 12 11/750`s in
a ring). The department has had dificulty balancing the load
between the teaching machines for a number of reasons, some I can
understand and some I can`t. But, anyway there have been moments
when we had 25-30 waiting processes on our 11/780 while other
machines were virtually idle. The late bloomer in this regard
was the IBM 4341 running VM. There were about 100 graduate students
using it for a compiler course and a networking course last fall.
It ran like a champ, never crashed and could compile 10,000 lines
of Pascal in about 10 minutes. It was so reliable that, as I understand,
the department put a few more courses on it and the students started
doing things like tracing the OS code and WHAMMY, the machine has
been going down more often than your generic $5 dollar streetwalker.
It can be argued that there is only one course or professor who may
be causing all this grief but, at the UW this seems to be a common
occurrence. As the story goes, some professor gets over ambitious
and without realizing it, assigns a project or group of projects
which totally cripple a machine. The obvious solution is for all the
instructors to get together at the beginning of the semester and
present their proposed assignments and their respective due dates
(which can be even more critical) in order to schedule the available
resources most optimally(Banker`s Algorithm anyone?).
In closing, and I could go on, I would like to say that I think the
department is becoming more aware of its problems, though solutions
are most often tied to the `ol $$$$$. As far as instructor/student
relationships, some of the faculty need to be a little more human.
It is unfortunate some people are majoring in CS because they
are genuinely interested in computers and enjoy it to boot.
Sorry folks, its all a matter of timing.
Bruce Hildenbrand
ATT ISL Denver
ihnp4!druxj!bhilden