Yoo've gotta be kidding me
With the Abu Ghraib experience that is registration now partly behind me, I can opine on a few related issues. Punchline: The technological inadequacies of this school have now pushed me to the brink of insanity.
I cannot grasp what genius thought it convenient to create the following student information/transaction websites:
BearFacts
InfoBears
TeleBears
Summer TeleBears
CalMail
The irony of course is that each of the bears use the mother of all passwords (which requires cyrillic characters and hierogliphs) so it would not be even remotely difficult to combine the functions. Second they are all "best viewed with Netscape." In case anyone missed the newsflash, Netscape now only lives on through Mozilla and Firefox. Although I am an avid Firefox user, I don't understand why anyone would design a website that is not ideal for the browser used by 90% of your clients. Hmmmmm....
If we leave the main campus and move to Boalt for a second, we see the situation does not improve at all. First, you need to look up your enrollment time on InfoBears...or maybe BearFacts...not sure. Then you need to figure out your schedule from this. Remember, you must go to Fall 2005, then wade through the classes to find something that (1) intrests you since all you see at first are course titles (2) click on the course to find (i) the Professor teaching it, and (ii) the days and times the course is offered, and (iii) credits, grading, etc. Be sure to write all that down, since there is no capability to somehow select courses you like to see how they fit with the rest of your schedule. In fact, the Registrar is very kind in giving us a packet that lists all the courses for the Fall semester (about half of which have the correct corresponding professor listed, if any) along with a sheet that has each hour blocked off for a week. But only up to 5 PM. It's not like 85% of the classes are offered after the sun sets. I don't want to sound like an ingrate, I actually liked putting my highlighters to non-holding/facts/proc/issue use. In fact that method was far more superior than being able to search for a class by units, or by schedule.
If you're so curious as to actually care about enrollment counts, you are once again SOL. Some claim that there is a secret, mysterious procedure where you can get such information by using one of the Bears. To the best of this writer's ability and at press time, these appear to be rumors. Shawn Bayern, the incoming EIC of CLR does have a website on his own server that tracks current enrollment counts for all courses at Boalt. Kudos to Shawn, but why does it take the ingenuity and brain power of CLR to come up with something as simple as this?
The reason that enrollment counts are important is because we are allowed to enroll in 12 units during phase 1 of enrollment. For some this is more than a full load, for others this is one unit shy of a full load, and yet for some this is a 4-unit class away from a full load...but there is no cap on enrollment in any class. Why not cap enrollment at 90%?
Here's a novel thought: offer useful courses at useful times. As a bar course, I think quite a few more people would be interested in taking Estates and Trusts if it was not competing with the Tonight Show. Also, I think we can forego the classroom space of Topics in English Legal History for, oh I don't know, another course on legal ethics since it's kinda sorta mandatory for us to take (at the moment, according to Shawn's site, the only legal ethics course offered in the fall is waitlisted).
Lastly, as co-blogger Earl Warren has asked before, why don't we have a site that allows professor ratings and comments by students who have taken their courses? I'm glad that the course eval results are posted for every prof, but with an average rating of 4.8 (on a scale of 1-5) and a standard deviation 0.00003 this tells me nothing other than that Boalt professors are just bad asses...a probabilistic coincidence that is as likely as the rapture occuring today at noon.
A lot of people come here from a lot of different schools and I'm sure that there is no other school represented here at Boalt that has these technological shortcomings. But then again, how many bloggers out there can claim that they're going to have a syndicated series dedicated to their professor? That's right, I'd like to formally announce the series, "Yoo Said That?" which will cover the lectures of Prof. John Yoo, of torture memo and war powers memo fame. Should be fun.
And lastly my upcoming schedule:
Con Law -- Structural (Yoo)
Income Tax I (Rakowski)
Bonehead (Legal) Accounting
Financial Analysis (possible Drop)
Legal Ethics (God willing)
I cannot grasp what genius thought it convenient to create the following student information/transaction websites:
BearFacts
InfoBears
TeleBears
Summer TeleBears
CalMail
The irony of course is that each of the bears use the mother of all passwords (which requires cyrillic characters and hierogliphs) so it would not be even remotely difficult to combine the functions. Second they are all "best viewed with Netscape." In case anyone missed the newsflash, Netscape now only lives on through Mozilla and Firefox. Although I am an avid Firefox user, I don't understand why anyone would design a website that is not ideal for the browser used by 90% of your clients. Hmmmmm....
If we leave the main campus and move to Boalt for a second, we see the situation does not improve at all. First, you need to look up your enrollment time on InfoBears...or maybe BearFacts...not sure. Then you need to figure out your schedule from this. Remember, you must go to Fall 2005, then wade through the classes to find something that (1) intrests you since all you see at first are course titles (2) click on the course to find (i) the Professor teaching it, and (ii) the days and times the course is offered, and (iii) credits, grading, etc. Be sure to write all that down, since there is no capability to somehow select courses you like to see how they fit with the rest of your schedule. In fact, the Registrar is very kind in giving us a packet that lists all the courses for the Fall semester (about half of which have the correct corresponding professor listed, if any) along with a sheet that has each hour blocked off for a week. But only up to 5 PM. It's not like 85% of the classes are offered after the sun sets. I don't want to sound like an ingrate, I actually liked putting my highlighters to non-holding/facts/proc/issue use. In fact that method was far more superior than being able to search for a class by units, or by schedule.
If you're so curious as to actually care about enrollment counts, you are once again SOL. Some claim that there is a secret, mysterious procedure where you can get such information by using one of the Bears. To the best of this writer's ability and at press time, these appear to be rumors. Shawn Bayern, the incoming EIC of CLR does have a website on his own server that tracks current enrollment counts for all courses at Boalt. Kudos to Shawn, but why does it take the ingenuity and brain power of CLR to come up with something as simple as this?
The reason that enrollment counts are important is because we are allowed to enroll in 12 units during phase 1 of enrollment. For some this is more than a full load, for others this is one unit shy of a full load, and yet for some this is a 4-unit class away from a full load...but there is no cap on enrollment in any class. Why not cap enrollment at 90%?
Here's a novel thought: offer useful courses at useful times. As a bar course, I think quite a few more people would be interested in taking Estates and Trusts if it was not competing with the Tonight Show. Also, I think we can forego the classroom space of Topics in English Legal History for, oh I don't know, another course on legal ethics since it's kinda sorta mandatory for us to take (at the moment, according to Shawn's site, the only legal ethics course offered in the fall is waitlisted).
Lastly, as co-blogger Earl Warren has asked before, why don't we have a site that allows professor ratings and comments by students who have taken their courses? I'm glad that the course eval results are posted for every prof, but with an average rating of 4.8 (on a scale of 1-5) and a standard deviation 0.00003 this tells me nothing other than that Boalt professors are just bad asses...a probabilistic coincidence that is as likely as the rapture occuring today at noon.
A lot of people come here from a lot of different schools and I'm sure that there is no other school represented here at Boalt that has these technological shortcomings. But then again, how many bloggers out there can claim that they're going to have a syndicated series dedicated to their professor? That's right, I'd like to formally announce the series, "Yoo Said That?" which will cover the lectures of Prof. John Yoo, of torture memo and war powers memo fame. Should be fun.
And lastly my upcoming schedule:
Con Law -- Structural (Yoo)
Income Tax I (Rakowski)
Bonehead (Legal) Accounting
Financial Analysis (possible Drop)
Legal Ethics (God willing)
Labels: Law School, Rabid Conservatives, The Resident Evil
posted by Armen Adzhemyan at 10:18 AM
4 Comments:
You don't know how good you have it You should have been here before they synched up the bearfacts and telebears passwords. Then you had to remember even more pass words and IDs. You should have been here before they had online telebears. Trust me you have it good.
Yes I also enjoy the joys of electricity in the classroom now...it's in fact not even 6 months old. If we go by the measure of what's good by Berkeley standards I'd have to get a diesel powered laptop to get through 2 lectures back to back. Or maybe use nuclear powered technology from aircraft carriers.
Just a bunch of spoiled kids you are. Wanting electricity and the ability to review your professors online. What do you think this is UCLA or Standfurd.
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