A guide to selecting classes

Choosing the right classes each semester can be difficult, and when paired with selecting good professors, the task can become truly intimidating. Happily, a number of resources are available for the discerning student. Use the following list to augment your academic shopping cart.

Selecting Courses

The first step on your academic shopping trip is to check your degree progress to see exactly what you need to take, and in what order. You can login to the My UCCS Student Portal at my.uccs.edu using your network username and password, and from there click the "Class Schedule and Grades" tab. The Degree Audit Reporting System (DARS) link at the bottom will guide you through an extensive explanation of the status of your degree, from your GPA to remaining courses required to a handy dandy pie chart.

Using DARS is a helpful step, said Susan Mitchell, director of Student Success. "However, there is no substitute for actually talking with a professional academic advisor in the Student Success Center...That gives us the opportunity to provide more comprehensive assistance to students and to be sure they are on the optimal path for achieving their degree."

Choosing Professors

A number of resources are available when seeking the right professor for you, not the least of which is ratemyprofessor.com . On this marvelous website, you can search for professors by name or school, and receive a number of reviews from students who have taken classes from the professor in question. For any single professor, reviews may range from laudable to condemning, but a seeking student is always bound to learn at least something of a professor's teaching or classroom style from the site. There is concern, however, that the grades students receive may color their reviews. "The ratings are very poor because students who received a bad grade write lies, plain and simple," said Professor Norman Schultz of Metropolitan State College of Denver. Regardless, students continue to use ratemyprofessor.com to help them choose the teacher that's right for them. For those who want to research on the go, there is even a Rate My Professor iPhone application.

Faculty Course Questionnaires (FCQs)

At the end of each semester, students will be asked to fill out anonymous surveys evaluating their professors in areas like availability, student treatment, ability to encourage student interest in their subject and the course's intellectual difficulty. After a while, these tests will become commonplace, but the information gleaned from them is utilized by individual instructors to improve their teaching style and by department chairs and deans to assess promotion, salary and tenure decisions, according to uccs.edu.

The results of FCQs are made available to students and faculty Online at fcq.colorado.edu. Students can use the input of previous students via FCQs to aid in selecting which professors to take in coming semesters.