AUC Caravan

By Farah Yousry

Professors should choose to accept more students into their sections to solve the constant student registration problems, proposed The American Universiy in Cairo faculty senate during their first meeting this spring semester last Tuesday.

“We are assigned to play a role to explore immediate or long-term solutions that we might advise the administration to use in order to relax the problems,” said Awad Khalil, chair of the student affairs committee of the university senate.

The committee described the situation as having “more than one player,” the administration, the students, and managing and planning services.

While the final decision is ultimately up to the administration, the senate’s initial proposal hasn’t been received well by faculty.

Naila Hamdy, chair of the journalism and mass communication department said the solution is not to overload course sections, but rather pooling resources and hiring more professors, or opening more sections.

“Some numbers we just can’t go over because of accreditation standards,” Hamdy said. “Twenty students is a good number but it depends on the course. If it is a lecture course then the number can go as high as 40 students per section.”

Hamdy added that undeclared students usually face the most problems. Nevertheless, there was consensus that the senate should listen to what the students have to say about the problem in order to understand their perspective.

“Nobody has the time to give the students explanation when they ask for the courses, they always find closed doors and people shouting at them,” said Ghada El Shimi, senate member and writing instructor at the department of rhetoric and composition.

Still many of the committee members believe students are one of the main causes of the registration problem as they opt to go for the classes they want, rather than the ones they actually need.

“Some students want to take a course with a certain professor and so they get stuck when they find the section of their desired professor closed,” said Casey Grimmer, another senate member. “There is less sympathy for this argument though.”

In attempts to find a way around the issue of closed course sections, some collaborate with graduating seniors who have registration priority. The seniors enroll in classes they don’t need and drop them on registration day emptying a place for their younger friends.

According to Khalil, the implementation of the 2+2 schedule allows some students to cram their courses into two days in order to relax for the rest of the week and avoid the commute to the Kattameya campus, causing even more congestion.

The senate suggested educating and training students on how to have alternative plans so they do not get stuck when they can’t get into the courses they want.

The committee headed by Khalil was also concerned about the lack of information on the administrative front. If departments continue to rely on cases and stories of students rather than actual documented figures and statistics, the crisis will hardly improve, he said.

Mohamed Ramadan, student senate representative, said the Student Union is currently doing its best to solve the registration hassle.

“There is much more to the issue than us, students, it is with the system and the administration,” Ramadan said.

He pointed out that the student needs and academic problems committee would update the database of student registration complaints so the senate and the committee can make use of them when it comes to course scheduling decisions.

“As a common practice, most of the departments look at the schedule of previous years and change the title and copy it,” Khalil said. “We need to get them to consider the real need of the semester they are setting the schedule for.”

Political science and arab studies departments especially are facing more difficulties because of increasing enrollment rates and the popularity of their courses among study-abroad students.

The committee, in collaboration with student representative bodies, plans to conduct surveys among students in order to get feedback that can help in setting future schedules.

“We had a booth for academic issues during drop and add week,” said Omar Kandil, SU president. “We intend to conduct surveys and distribute them to 2,000 students.”

Grimmer added that for their approach to work, the senate would have to contact the deans and pro- vosts of each department.

“If we contact the [deans] of any department saying that your department has a problem, [they] would definitely work on fixing it as soon as pos- sible,” Grimmer added.