C/O Tim Gouw, Unsplash
With bird courses changing, so should we
By: Diya Ahmad, Opinions Editor
Even before beginning my first year at McMaster in 2019, the term “bird course” was well-known to the 500-large graduating class of my high school. In particular, McMaster’s fall course selection coincided with our high school graduation. Being one of the unlucky ones with a second-day course selection appointment, all I could do was watch worriedly as my peers scrambled to get a spot in one of the coveted “bird” courses.
The phenomenon of scouring the depths of r/McMaster to find bird courses isn’t one isolated to first year. In fact, the dichotomy between those with first-day enrollments and those with second-day enrollments is majorly rooted in the popularity of bird courses. While getting into a popular course is treated as nothing less of an achievement, it’s important to step back and reflect on the true impact of bird courses.
While getting into a popular course is treated as nothing less of an achievement, it’s important to step back and reflect on the true impact of bird courses.
DIYA AHMAD, OPINIONS EDITOR
This isn’t to say that there aren’t students who are genuinely interested in the aforementioned courses, but that the most popular motivation for taking such courses is to receive an easy grade. However, this assumption has its own pitfalls. On one hand, perceptions of which courses are “easy” and which are not are often wrong.
For example, modifications to the delivery of ECON 1B03, a supposed “bird course,” following the termination of in-person classes, such as the introduction of weekly quizzes, left many students feeling as if it didn’t meet their expectations of a true “bird” course. On r/McMaster, students expressed disbelief in the course ever being a perceived bird course to begin with, emphasizing the difficulty of five-minute quizzes that gave one minute per question to be answered.
Clearly, the uncertainty of class formats amid the pandemic and our return to in-person learning have left sentiments about bird courses to be lacking in reliability. The effects of this are more massive than initially meets the eye.
From personal experience, bird courses are often decided upon and chosen through conversations with upper-year students. Even throughout the semester, such students can be turned to for guidance through shared experiences. Due to the changing nature of previously-considered “bird” courses, there’s ultimately a breakdown in communication between younger and older students. The confusion and uncertainty that comes with beginning university is often resolved by connecting with others that have been through the same experiences.
Even something as simple as bird courses illustrates that the changes in the way we learn at McMaster has ultimately led to differences in experience and our ability to support one another.
Even something as simple as bird courses illustrates that the changes in the way we learn at McMaster has ultimately led to differences in experience and our ability to support one another.
DIYA AHMAD, OPINIONS EDITOR
Apart from our connection with our fellow Mac students, our over-reliance on bird courses has tremendous impacts on our learning. With Mac’s distinction as Canada’s most research-intensive university, it comes as no surprise that nearly all of the McMaster students that I’ve met have plans to pursue a postgraduate degree, whether that be graduate school or a professional program such as medicine or law.
Let’s take the example of medical schools. With rising admission averages for GPA, it’s no wonder bird courses are as popular as they are. After all, if each and every one of your course grades are being evaluated under a magnifying glass, wouldn’t you want to take all steps possible to ensure they’re as high as possible?
Yet, in my experience, bird courses have the potential to cause more harm than good. Oftentimes, I’ve had to spend more time on the endless assignments of a supposedly “easy” course than the ones mandatory for my degree. Even when a class has been truly easy, it’s undeniably difficult to devote time to subjects that you have no passion for. Oftentimes, I’ve felt that taking bird courses for the purposes of taking an easy course has caused me to feel as if I’m wasting my time and money at university.
Reflecting on my negative experiences with bird courses, I’ve changed my mindset entirely to accommodate electives that wouldn’t take away from my mandatory courses while aligning with my interests. Being in health sciences, a program that gives me numerous electives, I’ve found much more gratification in filling up my elective space with economics courses: a field of study that I have cared about since my time in high school.
There’s no doubt that choosing bird courses has its benefits, especially amidst the pressure to do well in order to gain admission to professional schools. Yet, when acknowledging changing course structures, internal satisfaction and “bang for your buck,” perhaps it’s time to do away with the trend towards bird courses.
By: Takhliq Amir
One of the earliest pieces of advice I remember getting when I began studying at McMaster was one I can almost guarantee every student has heard: to take bird courses.
Now I’m not sure where the “bird” in this phrase comes from, but its general meaning is to take courses that have easy content and are taught by easy professors.
There are several problems with this strategy.
Approaching one’s undergraduate degree with the mindset that a high GPA can be maintained by taking courses based on their level of “easiness” is fundamentally wrong for many reasons.
There might be individuals out there who may genuinely be interested in the course — trust me, you might think Earth Sci 2WW3 is just a bird course because it is about water, but it could be the best thing ever for someone out there — and if it has limited seats, then you may be taking a spot away from someone more deserving and definitely more invested in the content.
Even more than that, it represents beginning what should be the foundational point of one’s career with a way of thinking that essentially puts more trust in the difficulty (or lack thereof) of a course than in one’s own capabilities.
By deciding to take “easy” courses, students are essentially beginning a new journey considering themselves not competent enough to excel in tougher courses.
This certainly won’t apply to everyone, but there are many out there who begin university with the fear that their averages are going to drop by 15 per cent so they must try their hardest to avoid the “inevitable” failure.
There are people I know who have taken “bird” courses only to struggle often because they had absolutely no interest in the topic, thus eventually not putting effort into the course and suffering academically as well because of that.
Studying at a university allows you the freedom to choose courses from an incredible list of options. As a health science student, I was so excited to have had the opportunity to take a history course this semester, even though it may not necessarily count as one of the easier electives that others had recommended.
I took it because it is a subject I have always found to be fascinating — there are a lot of lessons to be learned from the past, and it can be incredibly entertaining too — but could not take due to limited elective space in the past.
It has required effort but it has also been rewarding and enjoyable, which has done a lot to push me to work hard for the course.
By deciding to take “easy” courses, students are essentially beginning a new journey considering themselves not competent enough to excel in tougher courses.
This is what I see as the purpose of elective courses. Most often it is an opportunity to pick the courses that you might be interested in, but it can also be a chance to step out of your comfort zone or explore something completely unique.
From beginner language courses to community-based engagement projects, all this elective space is there to give us students the resources and opportunity to increase our knowledge, improve our skills and develop our own undergraduate pathway.
It can expose us to other cultures, beliefs and perspectives, and push us to open our minds and see things in a way we may never have otherwise.
These types of scenarios can be so invaluable in teaching us about the incredible complexity of the world and the diversity of the populations that inhabit it.
I can completely understand the need to maintain a high GPA, and I would never say that students should not be strategic about choosing their courses.
It certainly would not be the best to take a course that is just not manageable in a particularly difficult semester, but it may not be to the benefit of one’s personal development to take courses that are also too easy (and sometimes boring).
When the interest is there, the hard work and effort usually follows. By taking courses simply on the basis of an easy mark, students do themselves the disservice of not trusting their own abilities and thus limit their experiences, knowledge, and growth.
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It’s that time of year again when our “trusty” friend Mosaic has decided it needs to slap on some lipstick on and call it an update. Mosaic, McMaster’s semi-new administrative information system, has a history of trying to improve it’s site visually with defective updates. The updates fail to deliver a functional, appealing product for students, professors, and administration. This year’s update, completed on October 31st, was not indifferent to the many of renovations preceding it, all while creating a multitude of new errors.
As much as Mosaic has attempted to throw itself into 2016 with minimalist graphics, it still falls short on providing a combination of decent design and easy usability. Sure, the little vector images are somewhat pleasant to look at, but the tiled layout is straight up confusing. The contrast to the old page is so harsh that the page becomes unreadable and now we’re more lost than we were before. There’s a drop down Home menu that’s centered for no apparent reason, you’ll see icons that are disgustingly close to the edge of the page and sometimes the red bar on the bottom doesn’t go all the way across. Safe to say this home page is a graphic designer’s nightmare.
Goddamn it, Mosaic. You take another 3-day vacation in the MIDDLE of the semester to update, and you don’t even change half the content? Taking a quick look at almost any clickable page, students will see the that the only significant change to the site that was made was to the Home Page. The Student Center tab has gone upsettingly unchanged, including the frustrating and hard to navigate Plan and Enroll system for course selection. These sections are arguably the worst aspects of Mosaic and desperately need a facelift.
While logging into Mosaic, you're greeted with a lovely, little error message that lists “There is no current buffer context.” Refresh the page, and you’ll notice in the We Fucked Up Mosaic Alerts section that you need to clear your browser cache to resolve the issue. You can do so by holding down shift and clicking refresh, or by clicking control + F5. However, you won’t be able to do these short cuts on mobile and sometimes they don’t work. If you manage to get into the site (which I don’t know why you would really want to), you’ll happen upon an abundance of currently unfixable errors hidden within. Let’s cross our fingers that the next update to fix those errors isn’t during January, when we’re all trying to access the site to change courses.
Looking to the second tile in the first row, you’ll see a video viewer for a quick tutorial on how to use the new site. Great! At least the creators know that we’re going to need help to steer through the new “improvements.” Watching the video, you’ll notice that many of the new features being showcased are the ones creating all the obnoxious errors on the live site, making this video a mockery. The video doesn’t even care to address that there are any problems with the site to begin with, which it should because, you know, it’s supposed to be there to help.
https://youtu.be/IMGGXqHBu_o
Mosaic before was only slightly less horrible than it is now, but it’s always been lacking one important aspect: the search bar. Mosaic, really? You’re going to ignore making student’s live’s easier by dismissing the fact that a search function exists on almost every other website? Eagerly waiting for this change, some had high hopes, as the compass looking icon in the upper right-hand corner was labeled as Navigation. Alas, it too creates an error message. Adding a website staple like the search bar to Mosaic could eliminate clicking the mouse 20+ times to reach what your destination. We barely have enough time to sleep and eat, let alone try to click our way through this bulky website.
What do you think about the new Mosaic interface? Did you run into the same problems that we did? What suggestions would you give to the Mosaic team so they can make a reliable product?
Shopaholics celebrate Black Friday or Boxing Day as their favourite time of year, but my favourite kind of shopping is course shopping the week before the Drop and Add deadline on SOLAR.
It’s easy to be complacent about the quality of your education, you register for the required courses and a couple of easy electives and voilà, your schedule is complete with hopefully a four-day weekend and no 8:30s.
But is this experience really worth the thousands of dollars you pay in tuition and supplementary fees?
Picking courses should not be an arbitrary process; you should take control of your learning experience and create a schedule that takes advantage of the full breadth of courses McMaster has to offer. If you’re in engineering, take a gender studies course, or if you’re in social sciences consider a science elective. When else will you have the opportunity to learn from someone with expertise in a discipline outside your comfort zone?
Beyond the subject matter itself, the learning process is shaped by two factors—the professor and the syllabus.
You may have to go fishing in the department or even email the instructor to ask for the outline because they often aren’t provided until you enrol.
Although professors haven’t started crowd-sourcing outlines yet, this doesn’t mean you can’t provide input. As anyone that has read the policy blurb knows, Professors reserve the right to modify the syllabus, which means your ideas for what the course should cover can be implemented—don’t wait until the evaluations at the end of the term.
The instructors themselves can make a class an incredible learning experience or a total flop. The only way to evaluate this is by meeting them in person. Sites like ratemyprofessor.com are subject to intense polarization and feature irrelevant categories like “hotness.”
Another reason you should go in person is that an impressive biography of publications does not necessarily translate to effective teaching skills. Sessional instructors can be just as great, and sometimes even more enthusiastic than tenured faculty.
Finally, don’t let red tape get in the way of you pursuing your passion. Some departments have waiting lists for classes that are full, and others may be willing to add a seat depending on your circumstances. It is even possible to have pre-requisites waived if you can provide a sufficient justification.
Optimize your degree. Don’t ignore an interesting class because it’s at 8:30 a.m. or on a Friday afternoon. A post-secondary education at a university like McMaster is an incredible opportunity; don’t waste it.
By: Bina Patel
It's time to implement a course shopping week
I think most undergraduates have, at some point, taken a course as an elective or possible major, only to regret it later. It’s very common for students to change their minds about their major during their undergraduate career.
So, many people have to retake the first year courses of a major in their second year of university. But often, students don’t even allow themselves to consider the option because of its implications: the extra time, effort, money, and maybe even adding a fifth year to the expected four. There is nothing wrong with taking an extra year or two, but I think I’m speaking for the majority when I say that if I were given the opportunity to re-do first year and really think about what academic path I wanted to pursue, I would most definitely take it.
The fault doesn’t fall on one party. Even though it is the students who are picking their courses, they cannot be held accountable for not being passionate enough about a subject, or for not having mapped out an exact academic plan at the age of 18.
We have found ways to relieve stress by implementing Reading Week, to reduce waste through Mac Green, and make a significant difference for an important cause through Shinerama. But now, especially at a time of immense financial struggle for many students, I think there needs to be a tweak in the system regarding the way in which we go about choosing our courses (don't worry, it doesn't involve SOLAR).
It's called “shopping week,”and currently only a few academic institutions have implemented it. I came across this in a news article in the Harvard Gazette, describing its success among students.
At the beginning of each term, one to two weeks are dedicated to students popping in and out of lectures and seminars which describe the nature and outline of the course. Based on what they find interesting, they can register in the course at the end of the shopping period.
Technically, we can still drop courses at McMaster in the first week or so (without academic and/or financial penalties), and then register in another that we think might ignite our interest to a greater extent. But this is not the same as having time to make an informed decision before officially committing to a course.
Someone may enjoy Ancient Roman Architecture more than Cultural Geography, or Religious Studies more than Introductory Psychology—we should encourage students to explore different subjects. Simply put, we should implement our own “shopping week,” because like the countless initiatives McMaster has taken on, it's another way to improve the student experience.
