As the year comes to an end, Germantown academy is trying something concerningly new for this year for course requests, GA is trying something new. Instead of the registrar putting the courses in for the students, the students get to put their own courses in.
The process starts the same as last year, filling out the courses a student intends to take for the following school year.
Followed by a meeting with their advisor to discuss the courses and ending with signatures from parents, advisors, House Heads and college counselors if necessary.
Last year, the process would have ended at signatures, but this year, students held on to the course request papers until May 11, where they had a special Community Time to fill out the courses by themselves on Veracross. Although this process gives students more independence, it is also more messy and prone to error compared to last year’s process and still needs changes.
First off, there are so many errors that could happen during this online course selection process.One,being the English seminar course selections for 11th and 12th graders. The seminars are set up in a different way where one has to remember to add alternative courses, making the process more messy and complicated then it should be
the student possibly spent a long time trying to rank as many as nine courses just to have to restart again, making the process take longer and be more time consuming.
Second, only the English seminars were covered on how to place them in veracross for seminars that juniors and seniors get to take, leaving science and math electives for students to figure out how to load, such as science research or statistics.
This makes students feel upset because those who are really passionate about taking courses in those subjects are left confused on how to enter the courses on to Veracross.
Although there are some negatives, there are some positives that come out of it too.
For example, having the students input their own classes gives them a little more independence and takes a little bit of stress off the registrar to do everyone’s course request, which can increase some class errors.
Some improvements to make the process less messy is showing a video about each elective and how to request all the different electives. This reduces the confusion that students have about how to do all of the different electives that students would want to take, so they understand how to load it and there is no confusion about anything.
Next, instead of students needing to put what term the elective happens in, I believe that they should automate what term it appears in.
As for English, one must pick the correct term, which is an easy step to forget, and they could mess up their entire English seminars, because they could be placed in a class they don’t want to take because they did the whole term wrong.
Finally, the description of the courses should be given on the course requests because for many students, they just skimmed through the book and weren’t able to get most of the information, so attaching a little description of the course can let students know about the course and if they want to do it or not.
The course request this year is a step up from last year by giving students more independence, I believe that more steps can be taken to make the process pain free for all of the students.