In just one week, students will begin selecting their Spring 2006 courses. While the University's Course Offerings booklet has been available for almost a month, the USG's online Student Course Guide (SCG) has yet to make an appearance.
Revamping the SCG is no walk in the park. The USG, however, has had ample time to do so. It originally planned to reveal a new and revised SCG this fall but failed to do so due to missed summer deadlines. A quarter of the way through the school year, the SCG remains un-updated.
There is no reason why the USG should not have long ago produced an updated, if not revised, SCG. The USG has struggled with missed deadlines and problems recruiting a new designer for the site, but the delay caused by these problems was certainly not inevitable. Responsibility for the SCG ultimately falls on the Academics Chair, Robert Wai Wong '06, and it should have been his first priority to get some version of the guide up on the web by November. This is what he has been elected to do, and he owes it to the student body to fulfill this job in a timely manner. Wong has also stated that the USG planned to devote "as much of our resources as necessary" to the SCG, so it does not seem that a lack of resources should have hindered the SCG's development either.
The USG has a number of plans for renovating the SCG — such as allowing people to add extracurricular activities to the scheduler. But as nice as it would be for the USG to tweak the guide until they got it just right, doing so is neither realistic nor beneficial to students in the short term. Right now students can't even add courses to the scheduler. The current SCG cannot be allowed to languish unused. It at least needs to be updated with current Spring 2006 course listings, some course reviews and a course scheduler. While students rely on the University's printed and online Course Offerings as well as the advice of peers and professors to select courses, the SCG fills a vital information gap.
No one expects the SCG's renovation to be perfect, but we all expect it to be possible. The USG has been promising a new SCG for months; it is now time for them to deliver.
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