It's that time again.

[torquill]

The biggest downside I can find to a quarter system is that I have to go through registration hell three times a year rather than two. (Or four times, as I'll be taking a summer course this year...)

While I have found nifty sites like Siscast, nothing beats the old-fashioned approach: toss all the potential classes and sections into a single spreadsheet, and see how many combinations you can pick out. I've already noted the course numbers and pulled down the list of sections for those classes. I'm in the middle of putting them into the spreadsheet.

This whole process is helped tremendously by the master grid I made last summer. The first time I made one was with my mom's help as I was going into UPS, painstakingly laid out on lined notebook paper; these days a spreadsheet makes it easier. It takes a full day to make it, but it saves my sanity many, many times over in the following years.

What's in the master grid: every class listed by the catalog as required for my major, with prerequisites, quarters it's offered, and lab hours. All the electives listed to fill out my major that I might possibly be interested in, with all the same data. For spring quarter registration, I just run down the "spring" column of the grid and pick up which courses are available. I toss out those that have unsatisfied prereqs, and pull the information from the current schedule of classes for the rest. Then I roll the dice and feed it all into the spreadsheet.

Getting a workable schedule that gives me the classes I need is still insane (I posted about last quarter's clustermouse), but at least I don't have to keep referring to the catalog to find out what classes I still need to graduate, and guess at prereqs and quarters offered.

Off to feed the rest into the grid and sweat over the results...

Comments

[firestrike.livejournal.com]

How reliable is the info on your master grid? I'm assuming that you make it up when the annual schedule comes out. Does this leave you vulnerable to later changes in the class schedule? And how common are such changes? (The top three history classes on my list for this semester were all canceled a week before registration began.)

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

I haven't had anything cancelled... if anything, I've found that I need to check courses that I had listed as "Fall only", as at least one of them is offered this spring as well. And one course that I thought was gone is back in this year's catalog.

Once I've done the grid with all the ones I know are offered this quarter, if I need a lighter class to fill things out I'll go through the likely departments in the course schedule and look at what's out there. That's how I found out Ento100 is offered out of turn this quarter... and the catalog has been altered to say that it's offered F and W, but still not S. whatever.

At least the grid tells me what I still need to take, and what to look for. In cases where a class isn't offered every year, the major requirements list an alternative (PLB 142 or 143). It's a good starting point. Then the schedule of courses makes the final call.