What Courses Should I Take?

The first thing you should do before choosing your courses is check what classes you need to take and in what time frame. Most colleges have certain groupings of general education classes you have to take divided into categories. Also check the requirements for your major if you have chosen one (for help choosing a major check out my guide here).

In this example we will look at how to decide which class to take out of all the classes listed under the C “Science, Mathematics, and Technology” category.

Use your school’s online system to look at a list of all the classes within a category. If your school does not have an online system for this purpose look at the registrar. As you can see here, I am searching for all the lower division classes which fulfill the C “Science, Mathematics, and Technology” category.

Once you have a list of all the classes in the category, ignore the classes you can’t take because of their lecture times and the classes you just really wouldn’t want to take. Now make an account on www.myedu.com. Myedu is a multipurpose education tool that we are going to use to see the grade distribution (what percentage of students who have taken the course get A’s, what percentage get B’s, C’s, and so on) for each course within the category.

On the top menu bar click “Schedule & Courses” then “Browse Courses at My School.” Click the department of the class you are searching for and then click the exact class title.

Here you will see the grading distributions for the class. Not all classes will have grading distributions. Tread carefully when considering the classes that don’t have distributions (I never choose any of these classes as I view them as too risky for my gpa). Make sure you click on the professor who is teaching that class the quarter you are choosing these classes for. If there is a distribution for the class, but not the specific professor teaching it that quarter, once again be careful as even professors teaching the same class can grade radically differently. You can also click each professor’s name to see what they give out for grades in the other courses they teach.

Now go to www.ratemyprofessors.com/ and sort by school and then choose the professor of the class you are investigating. Ratemyprofessor is a site where students rate the quality of their professors on different metrics and is useful for determining the potential quality of a professor.

Now create a word document and put in the two ratings from myedu and ratemyprofessor. For ratemyprofessor just put in the overall score of the professor. For myedu I like to put in the % of students who received an A in the class plus the % of students in the class who received an A- ÷ 2 since I primarily care about the viability of receiving an A in the class. If you would like to use a different way of calculating the myedu score feel free to experiment. Next rate out of 10 your interest in the class and your predicted proficiency (how strong you are in that subject and how well you think you could do in the class). Here I rate my interest level as an 8 since I am interested biological anthropology and put a 9 in predicted proficiency since I predict I will excel in the subject matter.

Now repeat this process with all the other classes in the list. This may seem tedious but it really only takes around 10-20 minutes depending on the number of classes. The more classes you do the faster you will get at the process. For the time spent it is really worth it to assure a successful quarter and prevent heaps of potential misery down the line. For simplicity’s sake I will only be comparing two courses here.

This step is a little more advanced but I highly recommend it. I use a formula based on the metrics we have are using to give each class an individual composite score. The formula I use is {[(Ratemyprofessor x2) + interest in class + predicted proficiency] ÷ 3} x (Myedu ÷ 10). As you can see here, Anth 5 is the clear winner. You are welcome to develop your own formula or to tweak mine. If all this is too confusing for you an easier, but less exact method, is to just eyeball the different metrics for each class and decide that way. Finally remember to always make sure that the potential courses you have listed do not overlap with each other time-wise and that the finals are at different times. If you liked my guide please share it so that other students can benefit from it. Good luck!

What Courses Should I Take? Resources

www.myedu.com

www.ratemyprofessors.com/