I think the University, rather than making you choose your courses (to calculate the number of units you'll be taking) before letting you pay, should simply ask how many courses you plan on taking and making you pay, then allowing you to fill in your schedule whenever your courses open up.

With the way things are now, we run into the problem of people filling up their schedule with courses they don't actually want, simply to reach the intended number of units. By doing this, they take the seats in that course from people who actually want to take it, so those people, in turn, end up taking courses they don't want to take. This cycle repeats, and many people end up unhappy with their schedules.

What do you think?

In engineering we only have 2 electives to take after first year, other courses are written in stone and we can't change that.

It's stylistically deigned to be that way....

You simply do not understand that University is basically run like a business... THEY WANT you to take as many useless courses so they can get as much funding as possible!

Sometimes you take a course you didn't originally intend to take and you find out that you really like that subject. Whole careers have been created like that.

Plus, what happens if the course you wanted a seat in never opens up? You might get to fourth year and suddenly need to take a bunch of courses just to make up the required amount to graduate, and you're not going to be any happier choosing from whatever is available then.

In general, I find mac's course selection to be really small, in terms of what is actually open to students from all faculties. It's not that the elective courses I wanted were full, it's that I wasn't interested in much of what was offered or the ones I wanted were closed to students outside of their programs because of limited space.

An 'A La Carte' menu of courses is an interesting concept. However, I think if everyone had the choice to pick any courses they wanted to, then they would naturally trend towards picking the easier/fun courses, and not the tougher ones. This would lead to people graduating without doing the hard stuff.

Sure, some students that are disciplined will take the proper courses that are hard (maths, etc) that have hard exams, teachers they may not like, but want to learn the material. But my guess is not many would, it's sad but true.

Imagine the same concept for high school. If we had the choice to take whatever we wanted in high school I have a feeling that 'Gym class' would be overbooked past capacity lol, while math and english class would be cancelled for not enough students

One point you bring up though is the idea of people taking classes just for the sake of having to fill the units up. That does happen. It would be interesting for the university to not measure things in 'years' but just let you stay as long as you want/need to stay a student to complete the courses required. So if a class is full one year (or not offered) and you really want to take it, you can just hold out on that class and take it the next year or another year when it opens and have an uneven course/unit load that year. I suppose it's possible, you could just stretch out your years and stay longer taking less classes, but then you wouldn't count as a full-time student.

Originally Posted by Chad

One point you bring up though is the idea of people taking classes just for the sake of having to fill the units up. That does happen. It would be interesting for the university to not measure things in 'years' but just let you stay as long as you want/need to stay a student to complete the courses required. So if a class is full one year (or not offered) and you really want to take it, you can just hold out on that class and take it the next year or another year when it opens and have an uneven course/unit load that year. I suppose it's possible, you could just stretch out your years and stay longer taking less classes, but then you wouldn't count as a full-time student.

You can do that now too; you just have to make sure you don't fulfill the requirements to graduate (which includes having a certain number of units).