Student Course Guide delays hit as undergraduates choose fall courses

Students scrambling to choose classes for next semester have heavily relied on the advice of academic advisors, upperclassmen and fellow peers for guidance — especially since the Student Course Guide has not been much help lately.

Referring to the delay of the SCG being updated this semester, Toby Clarke '04 said, "I can't choose my classes until I know which ones suck, and if they expect me to have filled out a sheet in a week, shouldn't they be able get the course guide up? Is it too much to ask?"

A male freshman said, "I feel bad for the people who care, because it is kind of time to choose the courses."

The SCG offers student reviews of classes, official evaluation statistics, professor comments on courses and Bookline which helps students buy and sell books on a one-to-one basis.

First developed by the efforts of T. J. Mather '99, the SCG is a collection of Perl and CGI scripts that process data provided by the registrar's office and a compilation of student reviews submitted online.

According to its incoming manager Savraj Dhanjal '03, the SCG rebuilds its entire website, creating fresh HTML every night to reflect the previous day's changes every night.

This year, for some, it has come too late.

According to its outgoing manager Inna Barmash '01, the SCG was delayed this year because the registrar's office was late in delivering its data.

The SCG directly depends on the registrar's office for its information, and because the registrar office has been converting its software systems, it was behind schedule in handing over its data this time, said Barmash.

This upgrade has posed additional problems for the SCG, as its managers have been feverishly adapting their own scripts to handle the new changes.

"It basically takes a while to modify our scripts, written a while ago by a different student," Barmash explained. "It is difficult to modify a code written by a different person. It's a huge site and it's so difficult to fix those bugs."

"Unfortunately, the SCG scripts are a bit disorganized, and are filled with little hacks for exceptions here and there," added Dhanjal '03.

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Barmash admitted that she and the rest of the SCG staff have been flooded with e-mails and phone calls, but maintained that for the most part, the SCG is up and running.

Basic information on courses should be available to students by today, she said.

"We are just working on fixing those bugs because we know how important [the SCG] is to students," she said. "It's really frustrating for us — and we are definitely working overtime to fix those bugs."

As for lingering problems on the website, Barmash pointed to technical aspects, including missing links to the registrar's office that she suspected should be up by today.

Additional difficulties involve format changes to the scheduler and temporarily disabled features such as adding classes to the schedule directly from its reviews.

Barmash stressed, however, that students should always check the registrar's site, because it has the most up-to-date and correct information.