A 2L’s verdict on Cognomos
I had been warned about Cognomos before entering 2L. After a year working with UV, I already knew we have a tradition of critically analyzing Cognomos every fall since its introduction to the Faculty (examples are here, and here). In my review of Law Follies 2021, I noted how harshly it commented on the Faculty administration and Cognomos. I thought it was merely a comical representation. It wasn’t until I attended the virtual Cognomos information session in mid-May did I realize the sketch was not so far off. The session was overloaded with information, which was quite difficult to grasp without access to the system itself — not many people have the pleasure of using an almighty course selection algorithm powered by Nobel Prize-winning economics in their undergrad, after all. The atmosphere was tense from the beginning, and students were constantly warned to adhere to a series of deadlines and closely monitor their waitlists because otherwise “there is nothing we [admin] can do.” The information session also fell on a major religious holiday, and I’ve been told by one of my fellow students that her request to have the session recorded was refused. Instead, she received powerpoints from the session and was asked if she would like to attend an additional Q&A. The Faculty administration apologized afterwards, but the reason why such request was refused remains unknown.
Cognomos promises to maximize some 400 students’ happiness in the course selection process with lower costs. That is a very lofty goal, but let me say this: a course selection system serving hundreds of students should not make such promises. “Maximizing happiness” seems to imply getting your preferred list of courses, but that simply cannot be true for everyone, given that the spots are very limited in the most popular courses, and many students have overlapping interests. I don’t know if Cognomos brings about more happiness than course selection methods available in other law schools or universities. However, I contend that the way Cognomos works creates a significant amount of anxiety, making the course selection process yet another stress-fraught experience in law school. This artificially imposed frustration is one of the hidden costs of maximizing happiness, but things do not have to be this way.
A major source of stress is the lack of transparency. The algorithm is a big black box, and there is not enough information to rank your courses with a reasonable anticipation of how your schedule will look like. For example, Cognomos does not reveal the real-time popularity of courses to students when they rank the courses. If a student wants multiple courses that look reasonably popular (a very likely scenario), they will need to guess how popular these courses are among their peers to allocate their rankings. While the “previous waitlisted courses” page provides a point of reference, historical waitlist numbers seem random for many courses. Student preferences change every year, and old information is not necessarily helpful. As far as I know, providing some new information in a course selection system is feasible. My undergraduate institution uses a bidding system: each student has 99 “wish points” to bid for their favourite courses, and the spots are given to the highest-bidding students until the course capacity is reached. The number of students who have added the course is updated in real time and available for all to see, so students can allocate their points across multiple popular courses to increase their chances of getting in. In that system, the reason for failing to secure a spot in popular courses is clear: the student was outbid by others, meaning that the student was not as eager for the course to invest in certain amounts of points as the ones who got in. In comparison, getting a place in a popular course seems like a matter of luck under Cognomos. It feels a bit like gambling, and such randomness arguably makes students feel worse-off due to a lack of proper explanation (“My friend and I both ranked this popular course at the 1st, and they got in but I didn’t — WHY?”).
The user experience of Cognomos is not pleasant either. The system asks students to select at least 66 credits and rank them all, which is a time-consuming process, but there is also no “save the progress” function other than (the unintuitive option) “submitting a ranking,” which generates another email to clog your inbox. When I added enough credits to proceed, they all ended up in the “Acceptable” pile, and dragging courses around was not a smooth manoeuvre at all. The sample schedules Cognomos generated were useless as it lumped fall term and winter term classes together. There was a lack of timely feedback when joining waitlists, particularly in the early stages of the add/drop period; the processing time varied from hours to days, and the courses that showed up as having spaces available in the system during the first add/drop week turned out to have long waitlists. Also, the whole system was unresponsive for the first hour of the direct add/drop (first come, first serve) period. Waitlists cannot be ranked, and if students do have a preference between them, they would need to “monitor their waitlists closely.” I felt like I spent way too much time on Cognomos than any other course selection system I’ve used, and it decreased the satisfaction I had from getting the courses that I wanted.
So did the omnipotent Cognomos give everyone what they wanted? Previous years’ reporting indicated that it was an absolute mess, but this time around, things seemed to have improved a bit. Most students I surveyed said they were not getting their ideal selection of courses, but nonetheless a satisfactory one. Still, a friend of mine reported a not so happy experience with Cognomos: the system overloaded one term and underloaded the other for him in the lottery, creating a series of headaches. He was told to add the courses that had spaces available or to apply for a Supervised Upper Year Research Paper (SUYRP), but he had no interest in these options. The waitlists had quite a lot of movement during the first two weeks of school, but the difficulty is that course materials are not available on Quercus to waitlisted students. When he did get off a waitlist of a desirable course on a Saturday, he found himself with 70 pages of readings to catch up on before the Monday morning class. Getting an acceptable schedule seems to be a common theme for this year’s course selection, but I am still doubtful on whether months of stress and frustration are justified for the algorithmic perfection of “maximized happiness.”
