New regulation triggers student dissatisfaction

(Photo from defacto archives)

(Updated April 19, 2009)On April 13 the administration officially announced a new regulation regarding the Fall 2009 course pre-registration process on AUBG's Online Course Registration System. Students who have completed 45 or more credit hours in their major can no longer pre-register for elective courses in the same major.

"We're trying to make spaces in courses available to students depending on how badly they need a course," Dean of Faculty Steven Sullivan said. "To some degree, faculty resources are always limited so we want to make particularly sure that we're using the resources as well as we can," he added.

"This policy was taken late, without students having the chance to plan better," said Vaska Dimitrova, SG vice president and liaison to Sullivan's office. Students would have picked different courses for pre-registration if they had been given an earlier notice, she added.

"It's an important issue and it shouldn't have been planned in such a short time," said student Veliko Markov, one of the initiators of a petition against the policy.

Markov and two other students, Zlati Dimitrov and Desislava Georgieva, said Sullivan proposed the regulation at a faculty meeting. "It was only a proposition when we first heard about it, nothing official," Markov said. At the discussion nobody said how long the implementation will take and which university structures will have to approve [of] it," Dimitrov said.

"When you are at this university it is stressed from the very beginning that you try to establish as clear a plan as possible on what you are going to do in the future," Markov said. "Everybody has an academic advisor just for this reason," he added. "By imposing that credit hour limitation on electives, [the administration is] basically altering our curriculum path at the end of our third year, which is hugely unacceptable."

"Enforcing such restraints would ultimately disadvantage students with one major who simply want to take as many courses from their major as possible," said junior Filip Lyapov, who is doing a single major in History. "If having two majors [was practically] turned into a requirement, I think that we should have been told this at the very beginning," he added.

"If this is left out, we think that in the future more limitations like this will continue to pop out and in the end you will get out with an education that is worth nothing," Markov said. Markov proposed a way to "solve the problem at its core, which is [to] provide enough and adequate faculty for [...] students to be able to get a quality education."

The regulation is due to the lack of professors in the business department, student Adelina Pavlova said. "The number of people majoring in that field is increasing obviously too fast and the administration is not able to hire enough faculty members," she added. "For the current situation this is the best that the administration can do so that everyone can take courses, but for the long term they just have to concentrate on hiring more faculty members," Pavlova said.

"There is a difference between what students want, and what students are entitled to deprive other students [of]," Sullivan said. "If spaces are available, I have no problem with students taking as many courses as they want," he added.

History professor Diego Lucci, a member of the Curriculum Committee, said he agrees with the policy because "a liberal arts institution is not a place where students are supposed to take only courses related to one area, one field." He added an elective course "allows you to enlarge your views and your knowledge in general" and "must not be necessarily related to your major."