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Friday, March 29, 2024

Class Schedule and Registration Guide discontinued

For years, students at UC Davis have used the Class Schedule and Registration Guide (CSRG) to plan out their schedules. However, starting in Fall 2012, the CSRG will no longer be printed, and a new Class Search Tool will take its place.

The primary reasoning behind the discontinuation of the CSRG was obsolescence. As class information regularly changes up until the time of registration, the CSRG often became erroneous right after it was printed.

The decision was also motivated by an environmentalist ideal, with the CSRG being useful only for the few weeks around registration. This was not considered worth the 100+ pages per booklet that were being printed.

Students did not directly participate in the decision to discontinue the CSRG, but careful attention was paid to student trends in the decision.

“Students simply did not seem to want to use the CSRG as much as they had in the past,” said student assistant Brian Bauer. “Students were ‘voting with their dollars.’”

As an alternative to the CSRG, an online tool called the Class Search Tool has been created.

“This has been available since Fall 2010 and has been received very well with increasing usage each term,” said Senior Associate Registrar Barbara Noble.

The Class Search Tool contains many useful settings and options to streamline the process of registering for classes that were not available with the CSRG.

“There are a bunch of options and settings that you can use to really narrow down the size of your search and refine it,” Bauer said. “Three big pieces of advice would be: use the ‘Open Only’ Tool, use the ‘Saved Courses’ feature and have SISWEB open at the same time to cross-reference courses.”

Though officials are optimistic that the Class Search Tool will significantly improve the process of class registration, they are open to possible modifications.

“Occasionally we will get excellent suggestions for how to improve the Class Search Tool and we take those very seriously. Several of these suggestions have been implemented in order to make the tool more user-friendly,” Noble said.

In order to smooth the adjustment from the CSRG to the Class Search Tool, an electronic version of the Fall 2012 CSRG is available online. However, this may be discontinued in the future.
Both the online CSRG and the Class Search Tool can be found at registrar.ucdavis.edu.

ROHIT RAVIKUMAR can be reached at campus@theaggie.org.

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