Overloading getting worse

Kayla Webley
2004-04-02
The Daily

Students trading courses during the 10-day drop and add period may seek to overload into a course but often face disappointment. Students face this struggle every quarter and the UW administration is trying to improve conditions to accommodate frustrated students.

In the meantime, however, recent over-enrollment and budget cuts have exasperated the problems.

According to George Bridges, dean of undergraduate education, the College of Arts and Sciences lost 43 faculty members and numerous teaching assistants due to budget cuts last year. Combined with the UW's over-enrollment, the factors have created a struggle within that college.

"Not only do we have more students coming through the system, we have fewer people to teach," said Bridges. "That's the formula for overloads."

When demand for a given course is unusually high, there are a number of other options to which some departments turn.

"You either hire a TA or faculty member to teach the class by recruiting someone -- which is not easy to do because of the timing involved -- or you offer faculty or graduate students the opportunity to make additional compensation," Bridges said.

However, Bridges said more pay is not always enough to entice some faculty involved with other courses or graduate students with prior classwork responsibilities to teach.

According to assistant registrar Matt Winslow, courses are automatically allowed to overload an additional 15 percent of the total enrollment. This is because of the expectation administrators have that many students will end up dropping the course.

"Students are looking for classes like one looks for clothes," said Bridges. "We know more students are going to drop than are going to add, so if we enroll 115 percent we anticipate that some percentage of students will always drop, and we will reach the 100-percent level."

The administration's system works because students end up dropping more classes than they add.

"The ratio of drops to adds for students is 1.1:6," said Bridges. "So for every one course added, students typically drop 1.6 courses."

The administration plans to address this problem with a new system it is testing for next year.

"Right now we are adopting a new approach," said Bridges. "What we are doing is statistical projections of the course demand for next year based on the size of the incoming freshman class."

In addition to using the number of incoming freshmen, the projection is also based on traditional demand for certain courses from the past four years. Bridges is looking at how many students did not get into any given course during the past year and adjusting for the number of empty seats at the end of the add and drop period.

According to Bridges, there has been difficulty linking adequate resources to departments to maximize the number of seats in high-demand courses. The new system should combat the problem.

The courses notoriously plagued with overloaders are called bottleneck courses. These courses, according to Bridges, are those that provide a gateway for a variety of students into various majors.

"Many majors require students to complete these courses," he said. "Students have to go through a course in order to become an engineer, for example, and if there is too much pressure on it (the class) they can't get through and then they can't get into or gain access to their major."

The math department offers six consistent bottleneck courses. According to Brooke Miller, director of student services for mathematics, the department is aware of the problem but is working to maximize spaces in the large 100-level courses.

"We are always trying to accommodate as many students as we can," she said. "That's our goal."

As students cross their fingers each time they go to check the enrollment summary for bottleneck courses, Bridges said the administration recognizes their concern.

"The issue is really complex, and yet it's really important to students because students are really frustrated and can't get the courses they want," he said. "We want students to get the classes they need and want. That's the most important goal we have."