Allow me to interject...

I _hate_ to break up all the hating that's going on on the blog this week (punctuated only by a little 2L transfer love, it seems), but something needs to be noted. We do a lot of complaining. And a while back, I complained about this:

it seems that Boalt has been doing a lot of things in certain ways just because "that's the way we've always done them." And a lot of these things are the ones the students gripe about most: registration for classes, class schedules, exam schedules... Where Boalt has been willing to innovate, students have by and large been pleased (everyone I know preferred being able to download and turn in their take-home exams on-line last semester). Why does the Boalt administration seem so afraid of change?

I'm not about to take credit for any major policy changes on the basis of a blog posting (well, maybe I'm going to gloat a little right now. OK, done.), but here's proof positive that the Boalt administration may be more responsive to student concerns than we usually give them credit for (snipped from this week's BBB, without permission):

The good news is that we will not be using ExamSoft this semester. For those of you who installed ExamSoft in prior semesters, you may receive an email from ExamSoft
informing you of their latest software upgrade. Feel free to disregard it.
Further details on how we’ll administer exams will be given in the exam memo (distributed in early April), but it’ll work much like take home exams – you’ll save your exam answers in a .doc file and upload them to the server at the end of the exam. We’ll still hand out paper copies of the exam. This means that Mac users can now take an in-house exam on laptop.

Examsoft was annoying, caused more problems than whatever facade of "security" it provided, and disadvantaged Mac users (who had to go out and rent/borrow a computer, or take by hand). This is a welcome change, and thanks go out to the admin people who made it happen.