As I registered for spring semester classes, I thought nostalgically of my freshman orientation experience. About two hours before we were scheduled to go home, we were ushered into a cramped room to await our “advisers” and register. I remember the shared sense of panic and confusion as we logged onto Testudo and Venus for the first time.
There were so many courses, professors, times and so on — it was total information overload. To make matters worse, the schedule my adviser created for me was completely useless due to the fact she didn’t factor in my Advanced Placement credits. Walking out of that room, I was actually more lost and confused than I had been when I entered.
When I asked my upperclassmen friends for help, they introduced me to the holy godsend commonly referred to as OurUMD.com. I obsessively checked and re-checked the ratings and grade distributions for the professors and classes I wished to take in the fall. I read all the comments and became wary of any professor with 3.5 stars and below. I made a master schedule and was determined to obtain seats in these classes.
Then came the hard part: adjusting my original schedule. Unfortunately, as all of us know, freshmen are at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to registration times. If registration was a food chain, freshmen are nothing but the scavengers that vie for the morsels of seats in classes that upperclassmen don’t want or had already. Because I was in China for most of the summer, I had to adjust to a 12-hour time difference. You could count on me to compulsively log onto the Internet at 7 p.m. on the dot, checking for any open seats in the sections I wanted. I realize that this sounds a little over-the-top, but I’m sure that some of you understand my sentiments.
By August, I had my dream schedule made — or so I thought. As I mentioned before, I relied heavily on the ratings on OurUMD. Even if only one person had rated a particular professor, I felt as if this one opinion represented a consensus. It’s human nature to overlook the details when there are four or five happy little stars next to a professor’s name. And it’s easy to assume one professor is better than the other because one has 10 people on his or her waitlist while the other has ten open seats in his or her class. As the semester progressed, I realized that there really wasn’t that much of a difference in terms of teaching ability between a professor who was rated a little lower than another.
Lesson Learned: OurUMD is useful but is by no means a definite indicator of which course or professor is better. There are always disgruntled students who use OurUMD as a way to rant about a course they failed — ever wonder why the bad ratings seem to come from people who leave the “Grade Expected” field blank? And there are always those one or two exceptionally good and bad classes with skewed grade percentages. Perhaps OurUMD is a little overrated.
Angelina She is a freshman neurobiology and physiology major. She can be reached at she at umdbk dot com.
