Maximizing happiness, it did not
Another year, another disappointing upper-year course selection process. Ultra Vires collected responses from the student body on their experience with both Cognomos, the law school’s course selection platform of choice, and the overall course selection process this year, given all the changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. TL;DR: Cognomos sucks.
Some students had positive experiences with Cognomos.
“I got into most of my desired classes, got good alternative courses for the ones I didn’t get into, got into a class I really wanted that I was high on the waitlist for, and had enough credits from the get-go,” says Rebecca Xie (2L)
Joseph Galinsky (2L) said it was “very easy to use, [had] seamless transition, and impressive results.”
However, many students’ experiences differ. One 2L who wished to remain anonymous characterized this year’s course selection process as “trash.” Julia Gauze (2L) said, “it was awful,” describing how Cognomos assigned her to two sections of the same class and classes with conflicting time slots. She ended up with only eight credits in the fall term, and was left to the mercy of the waitlists to fulfill her remaining credits.
Students also voiced concerns with the website itself. A student who wished to remain anonymous described: “It sends an email every few minutes when trying to add to a course which fills up my inbox. Furthermore, it doesn’t say what reason causes flags to exist so you have to verify several different things, which wastes so much time. It could be pre-reqs, time conflicts, or credit counts and you don’t know which.”
Some students are willing to grant the administration some leeway in light of the special circumstances brought upon by the pandemic. “Revamping your entire course selection system to accommodate a pandemic is no easy task,” said one 3L who wished to remain anonymous. “However, a lot of problems (i.e. insanely long waitlists at the beginning of add/drop and the dearth of Fall + International, Comparative, and Transnational courses) could have been easily avoided or remedied with a little more foresight. After-the-fact responses, such as spillover sections or ‘do a journal/Directed Research/Supervised Upper Year Research Project,’ are unsatisfactory when they are only available for courses you have already taken and/or have no interest in.”
Multiple students also voiced their concern with the administration’s response to the difficulties of course selection.
One anonymous student noted that the administration attributed the state of that student’s timetable to their personal choices in course rankings, while not acknowledging the role the school has in providing enough seats in courses for Cognomos to allocate. During the waitlist period, the administration scrambled to add seats to online sections, including spots available to in-person students.
A 2L student recounted the difficulty they had trying to obtain answers from staff, sending several polite emails to the administration and placing a total of 10 phone calls to different numbers listed as contacts, to no avail. When they finally received an email, they found the responses within to be brief and on the whole, unhelpful.
In spite of all these challenges, some students eventually found acceptable schedules. A 3L student said: “Despite being far below the credit minimum and in the bottom half of waitlists for most of my courses this year, I eventually finagled a decent schedule (including my favourite course), so I have less cause for complaint than some of my peers. However, the path to this schedule was unnecessarily stressful and felt like the result of poor planning.”
Read about how this year’s course selection process went here.
