University Tries To Ease Registration

With last Friday marking the commencement of spring semester registration, Boston College's department of Student Services began the implementation of several new aspects to the Agora Portal in an effort to streamline the registration process. Alongside the registration process itself, the University continues to work to strengthen the adviser-student relationship to facilitate an easier registration procedure.

The creation of a feature utilizing end-of-year teacher evaluations speaks to the concerns of students and is the product of a collaborative effort among the Undergraduate Government of BC (UGBC), the office of the provost, and Student Services. "It's something students have been asking for some time," said Al Dea, president of UGBC and CSOM '10. Uploading the evaluations was done with ease, said Louise Lonabocker, director of Student Services, because of the switch from paper evaluations to online evaluations. "We are able to display these summary results so that students can see those," she said. "It also gives new faculty four semesters before their results are posted as an opportunity to get themselves established."

Dea, along with UGBC directors of academic affairs, have been working the provost's office, particularly Donald Hafner, vice president for undergraduate affairs. "We're hoping that students use these evaluations to choose courses and use the quantitative data in terms of helping decide in the future what courses to take," Dea said.

The application uses empirical data to measure the essential qualities of a professor, including preparedness, availability outside of class, and enthusiasm for the subject. "Last year was the only time the survey instrument was ever changed," said Julie Salem, student system information specialist and overseer of the Agora portal project. "They added additional questions and made it much longer. Therefore, we're only showing the last academic year's survey."

"It's completely different from the PEP system," Lonabocker said. "These are the official results, so when students do the surveys at the end of term, our response rate is almost 90 percent. So you're getting the feedback from almost every student in the course as opposed to the PEPs when you're just getting anecdotal feedback."

The UGBC's involvement with registration, however, does not end there; they work with multiple departments to continue to improve the advising system. Dea and Alex Hirs, vice president of the UGBC and A&S '10, have created a survey with which they hope to obtain data regarding the students' position on adviser-student relations. "This survey is part of a bigger project," Hirs said. "We also plan on hosting focus groups, having one-on-one discussions with faculty and students, as well as looking at how different schools work with their advising system."

The administration has already put into effect several programs to assist in the improvement of the advising system. "An excellent advising system should offer occasions and resources throughout the year so that students can get guidance on their path through BC and beyond," Hafner said in an e-mail. "The Academic Advising Center's 'Professors and Pastries' events, where lots of networking and informal advising goes on, have been drawing larger and larger crowds of faculty and students."

Hafner still has long-term goals for advising at BC, however. "The sooner we all get away from the stunted notion that "advisement" occurs for only two weeks before course registration, the better we will all become at doing the things year-round that produce meaningful advising relationships between faculty and students," he said.

He also took into consideration CSOM's Portico class, in which students are taught by their advisers. "Students and their advisers who are meeting in classes each week are more likely to discover those ripe moments throughout the semester when students are perplexed and can benefit from the wisdom and experience of a faculty member," Hafner said. "Right now we have about 60 percent of our freshmen in such course-based advising relationships in their first semester. I hope we can steadily increase that until almost all first-semester freshmen are in course-based advising relationships."

Improvements to the online course catalog on the Agora portal began over a year ago because instructors were given the ability to post syllabi online. "Many faculty have posted their syllabi," Lonabocker said. "I think for the past two semesters we've had over 500 faculty members post their course structure."

One of the new additions to the site, however, is the course-specific textbook information. This new facet takes the worldwide economic crisis as well as students' individual financial situations, into consideration Lonabocker said. "The new textbook feature is actually a regulatory requirement as a result of higher education re-authorization," Lonabocker said. "By 2010, schools have to make sure that students can see the textbooks required for those courses, so we're already a little ahead of schedule." Lonabocker said that the books may not be available at the time of registration but will be by the time classes begin.