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Volume CXXXIII, Number 1 |
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Finding your bearings
After years of anticipating the arrival of grade reports, anxious Bowdoin students no longer need to stake out their mailboxes following a hard semester's work. The Office of Student Records has finally taken the guesswork out of tracking one's degree progress, distribution requirements, and GPA with the implementation of the Bearings system.
Fast and user-friendly, Bearings places a wealth of information at each student's fingertips. The move eliminates the reams of paper required to print class schedules, grade reports, and course information packets. Bearings also represents a long-overdue effort to update the College's operational systems. Aside from student information, Residential Life's room inventory forms are now online, as well as the signups for intramural sports. More modernizations are sure to follow.
While Bearings is certainly a welcome change, one relic of Bowdoin's computerless age remains: the long paper trail of course registration. Each semester, students are sorted into classes by way of a paper-and-computer procedure that could be simpler and more efficient.
The most obvious next step is electronic course registration, a process that many other U.S. colleges and universities have employed for years. The online system provided for Bowdoin students studying off-campus is an ideal model and should be extended to the entire student body. With this improvement, Bowdoin will take one more necessary step out of the Stone Age.
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