You may have remembered Bwog's last attempt to aid you in your schedule. Below, we've matched courses offered this Spring to a variety of personalities in an effort to create the perfect schedule. If you have any other suggestions, email bwog@columbia.edu and we'll post them!

For the Ontologist:

Spring 2009 Anthropology G6044
THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE

Spring 2009 Anthropology G6085
THING THEORY

Spring 2009 First-Year Seminar BC1166
THE ART OF BEING ONESELF

Spring 2009 Architecture A4542
IMAGINING THE ULTRAREAL

Spring 2009 Architecture A4718
FAKING IT

As registration nears, Bwog worries many of you remain undecided in choosing your fall 2008 classes. To help the undecided and unsure, we've compiled a list of some of the most promising-sounding courses. Know of interesting sounding classes? Send them our way (bwog@columbia.edu) and we'll update the list.

Specificity is a Construct

Fall 2008 Art History G8608
THE ICONIC TURN

Fall 2008 Anthropology W4042
AGENT,PERSON,SUBJECT,SELF

Fall 2008 Anthropology G6207
PROFANE ILLUMINATION II

Fall 2008 French W3628
DISCOVERING EXISTENCE

Spring 2008 Management B9712
PROSEMAINAR

Big news in the case for transparency in academia: Starting in the spring, CC students may be able to view the results of their course evaluations online—specifically colorful bar graphs illustrating the section in which students rank the class and the professor from 1-5. CCSC has been working on the project since last year, but ESC has already been doing this for quite some time with a program called Oracle. "Knowledge is power," proclaims Oracle. Indeed!

Daily reminder e-mails make it pretty hard to forget that it's course evaluation season, but CCSC Policy dude Alidad Damooei says that the spiffy new system will only become reality if you actually fill them out: "I am pretty confident that the project will come to fruition but the ONLY [his emphasis] possible threat is a low response rate," Damooei explained in an email.

TAs, meanwhile, have been sweetly suggesting that their students do their academic duty and fill out the evaluations, especially if they've had a good time in the class. According to one source, the instructions they were given pronounce that "personal encouragement" is the best way to ensure a high participation rate.

Course evaluations, once the ideal time-killer for those last awkward 15 minutes of lecture, have been going digital for a while now, and it looks like they'll be on courseworks from here on out. A couple of luddite professors seemed peeved by the change, weighing in with comments like:

- "Reading between the lines of the online ones, they're not sure if it's going to work."

- "I asked the administrators and they said, 'I don't know,' and I said, 'Oh, why would you know?'"

-"I would just lie low until the hectoring reminder e-mails....It would be nice if you could separate out your irritation with the process from your reflections on the courses."

Do you like the online version? Bwog has heard of some pretty amusing anonymous TA and Prof evaluation comments, and we're sure you have as well.

At last night's CCSC meeting, a proposal to work towards a centralized course evaluation system was passed unanimously. Academic Affairs Representative Alidad Damooei '09, who co-wrote the proposal with Class of 2008 President Neda Navab, has been meeting with the Office of the Vice President for Arts and Sciences to come up with a uniform set of questions (ideally five or six) that can be published in an easy accessible format, similar to that of SEAS or other Ivy League schools. CCSC now plans to work with the Vice President for Arts and Sciences, Ann McDermott (with whom Damooei has been meeting recently) to come up with such a system, and to test questions through small focus groups.

If the system gets off the ground, only time will tell if any of the "official" published evaluations will ever assume the delightfully vulgar tone of moral outrage that the best negative CULPA reviews have to offer.