Who Sets Our Priorities?
I've been wondering how Boalt decides what courses to offer, and whether students' interests and demands play any significant role. Here are some interesting stats from Tele-BEARS website:
Evidence Section 1:
Enrolled: 153
Waitlisted: 21
Enroll Limit: 161
Evidence Section 2:
Enrolled: 82
Waitlisted: 25
Enroll Limit: 91
Topics in Evidence
Enrolled: 23
Waitlisted: 2
Enroll Limit: 26
The Evidence Advocacy classes all have similar waitlists; that's right, every single evidence class at Boalt currently has a waitlist. Other core classes in substantive law are similar. Compare those numbers to:
Foundation Seminar in the Sociology of Law
Enrolled: 10
Waitlisted: 0
Enroll Limit: 23
Law and the Emotions in Action
Enrolled: 3
Waitlisted: 0
Enroll Limit: 10
Designing Strategies for Neglected Disease Research
Enrolled: 12
Waitlisted: 0
Enroll Limit: 43
What's the take-home message here? I think it is that the allocation of course offerings at Boalt doesn't meet the demand. I think the extent to which there are empty seats in Foundation Seminar in the Sociology of Law, and standing room only in Evidence, is also the extent to which something is going awry.
The answer isn't to abolish Foundation Seminar in the Sociology of Law. The answer is to offer more Evidence classes. So, where is the holdup? It's obviously not students. Who does that leave? The faculty.
Evidence Section 1:
Enrolled: 153
Waitlisted: 21
Enroll Limit: 161
Evidence Section 2:
Enrolled: 82
Waitlisted: 25
Enroll Limit: 91
Topics in Evidence
Enrolled: 23
Waitlisted: 2
Enroll Limit: 26
The Evidence Advocacy classes all have similar waitlists; that's right, every single evidence class at Boalt currently has a waitlist. Other core classes in substantive law are similar. Compare those numbers to:
Foundation Seminar in the Sociology of Law
Enrolled: 10
Waitlisted: 0
Enroll Limit: 23
Law and the Emotions in Action
Enrolled: 3
Waitlisted: 0
Enroll Limit: 10
Designing Strategies for Neglected Disease Research
Enrolled: 12
Waitlisted: 0
Enroll Limit: 43
What's the take-home message here? I think it is that the allocation of course offerings at Boalt doesn't meet the demand. I think the extent to which there are empty seats in Foundation Seminar in the Sociology of Law, and standing room only in Evidence, is also the extent to which something is going awry.
The answer isn't to abolish Foundation Seminar in the Sociology of Law. The answer is to offer more Evidence classes. So, where is the holdup? It's obviously not students. Who does that leave? The faculty.
Labels: Classes/Professors
posted by Patrick Bageant at 12:47 PM
23 Comments:
why do some classes have waiting lists even though enrollment isn't full?
My understanding, from talking to the registrar, is that some seats may be allocated to 1Ls, some to 2/3Ls, some to transfers, some to LLMs, and some to, well, I don't know what else.
A simple solution would also be to increase enrollment. Those numbers don't match exactly to number of seats in the room.
I am sure professors would be unhappy because they have more exams to grade, but I am not sympathetic.
I think the school should offer evidence classes that emphasize different aspects of the law. The students interested in criminal law can take the evidence classes that currently exist (OMG someone could have intercepted the blood sample on the way to the lab and planted a fake!), while future corp lit monkeys could take a class focusing on business records. As a current corp lit monkey, that would have been a deadly boring but useful class.
Patrick, I agree with this post and I think it's an outrage that the classes students want and need aren't being offered, while bs classes (yes, they're bs. I take them, so I should know) take up valuable space in the building. I do think you are mistaken about one thing. Until the school covers bedrock law classes like Evidence and Con Law, the solution is indeed to abolish Foundation Seminar in the Sociology of Law. That stuff is gravy, and deserves a back burner the moment the school fails to meet students basic needs.
That would be the strong version of a theory of law school I guess you could call Core Functionalism. Or maybe Establishmentarianism. At the other end of the spectrum is Social Engagementatrianism. Or, as I prefer to call it, Squishy Curricularism.
You can tell which camp I belong to, and while I'm not willing to come right out and say it, if I had to draw hard lines they would look a lot like 6:31's.
Patrick, good topic, but I disagree. The core classes like evidence are absolutely important, but so are the small 'spice' classes. Its just that the numbers aren't as bad as you make them out to be. With the two large sections of evidence, over 250 students are taking it this semester. Sure, there's another 10% who would like to. But I'd venture none of them are 3Ls and so will have a chance in future semesters. Do we really need another section so we can teach 1/3 of the entire law school evidence, each semester? Saying its either the fault of students or faculty is a false dichotomy. Its about resources, and tuition's already on the up. As a 3L, I'm excited to see so many new classes, even if some sound ridiculous. We never had it so good, the school's getting better.
...and another point: do we really want every course we take to be with another hundred people? aren't those tiny seminars nice sometimes?
How about twenty Evidence seminars with twelve students in each? It's not like we don't have the faculty, right?
7:05, sounds like we agree, with Patrick, about no need to drop the small, interesting courses.
but if Evidence courses are waitlisted every semester we know that people are leaving boalt without having taking it. and other people can't take it early, when they want to use it as a gateway to other courses. look, the evidence classes are oversubscribed all the time, year after year. it's time to do something about it.
I'm glad this post was made. I think this is a real problem at Boalt, and I'm wondering what us students can do to actually make the administration consider a change of policy here.
I have no idea how the class schedule is put together, but it my imagination, there is a big faculty meeting that goes something like this:
Dean of Faculty: OK, colleagues, first up is Corporations. Who wants to teach corps next semester? How about you, Prof. Squiggly?
Prof. Squiggly: I taught it two years ago! I really want to teach this class on Maritime Law & Piracy -- I'm under contract to write the textbook.
DOF: OK, how about you, Prof Moogly?
Moogly: That would conflict with the seminar I'm offering on Business Hugs.
DOF: OK, what about you, Gaboogly?
Gaboogly: But you promised me I could teach Inuit Law!
Prof: OK, I'll see if I can find a visiting professor to teach it.
Perhaps this isn't the way it works. But I think it's ridiculous that some students will not be able to take core classes like Evidence and Corporations this year. These classes aren't just important because they are "bar" classes -- they are the classes that have formed part of the core of the law school experience with years. They give us a parity of experience with students from other schools. And they certainly aren't all just "black letter law" courses -- anyone who was in Corps I yesterday will attest to that.
I think the administration should consider adopting a "enroll every interested student" policy for a handful of key core courses -- evidence, corporations, crim pro, etc.
The "spice" courses are important, but if enrollment in these classes is less than half, we have too many spice courses.
9:20, I suspect that is exactly how it happens.
I suspect the upshot of that discussion is that a handful of faculty pull most of the weight teaching big, hard classes (i.e., the professors you know by name), and the remainder of the faculty does . . . other stuff. Nowhere, as far as I can tell, is there meaningful room for student input, which is troublesome. Given that student demand seems to be focused on traditional classes like evidence, con law, professional responsibility, etc., it the state of affairs breaks from troublesome and approaches the absurd.
9:20 here. I think an interesting fact is that, in general, the profs who do teach the "core" classes are more likely to be tenured "rock star" types -- i.e. Sklas!y, Sw!ft, Buxba0m, etc. So it's not a situation where the bigwigs are teaching pet courses. Also, when one of those profs does decide to teach a smaller seminar, they generally fill up really quickly.
I think profs need to realize that when they choose to teach a non-core seminar, they have to "market" that class to the students.
Outsider here. I think you have a legitimate beef, but a couple of points:
1. Admin probably is concerned, albeit not to the degree you would like. The evidence may be hard to find, partly because these decisions are not made in a big meeting, but rather through pestering individual faculty.
2. Not every professor is competent to teach every class, and conscripted professors without adequate background are more of a curse than a blessing. So there may be no quick fix, other than adjuncts, and that can also be a quirky market.
3. The long-term fix is to beef up hiring in the core areas. This may be hard to do for a variety of reasons: available talent; the difficulty of finding strong teachers of core courses with equally strong scholarly promise; the difficulty of forecasting a year or years in advance what student demand will be like. Believe it or not, student demand can be fickle, and sometimes a function less of an inherent demand for a class than a demand for a particular teacher of it per a particular schedule.
4. Deans do not have great tools for getting all the necessary calculations right -- you'd need to have a means of determining pent-up demand for a course, likelihood of over-subscription given time slots, etc. So while you have a legitimate concern if no one pays attention to this issue, you may expect to sometimes have fewer openings than you'd like.
5. If you identify someone on the faculty who could teach Evidence (say) but is not, consider going to her to ask her to do so. She would probably be flattered, or at least capable of explaining the situation.
Good luck.
Sounds to me like you are an insider, not an outsider!
Since pent-up is my specialty, maybe I should take it upon myself to take down waitlist data for the next three semesters.
One would think you could ask the student representatives on the curriculum committee to get this data from the registrar. Or the registrar directly, for that matter. Surely they keep track of it.
Oh, wait. Nevermind. This is the same registrar that assured us registration times were random, isn't it?
student rep on the curriculum committee is a great idea. we can easily poll the student body on what we want this semester and over the next few and get that data to the rep. rep meets with faculty with solid data and the support of the students. administration listens carefully and everyone compromises a little. problem solved.
how quickly can the student rep proposal be forwarded to the administration? remind them that it took concentrated student action to solve the "randomized registration number" mess. including us is in their own best interest.
Is there currently a student representative on the curriculum committee? If so, it seems like the thing to do would be to contact that person (they're the student representative, after all), not an administrator.
The poll might be as simple as "In what classes would you be enrolled, but for an existing waitlist?"
Outsider again, padewan.
1. For your poll, ask you not only "in what classes would you be enrolled, but for an existing waitlist?" Ask also, "what classes did you not attempt enrollment because of anticipated wait lists"?
2. Supplement with historic data of waitlists. If unavailable, ask yourself, "Who is likely to know, and more likely than not to favor adding additional sections, so as to make his or her own classes more manageable?"
. . . on the QT
Pencils are abuzz.
I could be mistaken, but I think Evidence is offered every semester and in general, it is not all that difficult to get into the Fall classes (as in, any 2L or 3L who wanted to could probably take Evidence and/or Evidence Advocacy then). If you don't believe me, check out the Fall 2008 numbers.
It is true that Swift generally only teaches Evidence in the Spring. But there will always be more and less popular professors. No one can take classes with *only* the most popular professors all the time (especially since now the telebears times are randomized). So I think people need to set their own priorities - there will always be professors or classes you wish you could take, but they might conflict or be so popular that other people also want to take them. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that people will always complain about class offerings. Popular professors will always have waitlists. Classes you want will conflict. Get over it?
Sarah Pauly and Marc Pilotin are on the curriculum committee. You may want to speak with them so they can convey students' opinions to the faculty and administration.
Thanks Alexis.
But contact them?!? As a general policy, we just like to complain here and hope things happen by some sort of magical osmosis. We don't ever contact people that can actually do anything about anything. You know that!
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