The Red and Black has a good article today that discusses the declining number of classes across campus and the declining number of tenure and tenure-track professors.  Students have always had trouble getting needed classes in some majors (*cough*, International Affairs and Political Science), but this trend is spreading.  The University and individual departments are making continual budget cuts, and keeping professors is hard on a short budget (as is filling vacant professor positions).  So departments are offering fewer classes.

This ultimately means many students are having trouble finding good classes.  That’s where we come in.

UGAKey.com helps you pick the best classes of those being offered.  Need an International Affairs class and none taught by the big name professors are being offered? Check out UGAKey.com and look for good graduate assistants, and make sure to check classes in Political Science and Public Administration (which can fulfill an IA major).  Do you need more classes to stay full-time? Look on UGAKey.com for good courses.  Are you worried about losing the HOPE Scholarship and not being able to cover your tuition bills? Look at UGAKey.com, browse an offered course’s syllabus, and find the classes that will keep you HOPE-eligible.  Drill down through departments and professors, sort classes by GPA or number of withdrawals to find what works best for you.

Remember, we have the most recent grades available (along with many course syllabi) so you can make the best decisions for your class schedule.

But that’s not all.  We are continuing to make improvements at UGAKey.com to help students, including:

• We are currently testing professor reviews, which will complement the course grades that are already offered.  You will be able to rate professors on the overall course,  homework, exams, and lectures, and provide general feedback.  We really believe this will help students register for classes.
• We are also waiting for the University to release textbook lists, so we can help you find the cheapest books possible.
• We will also be obtaining Fall 2009 grade data as soon as it is available.

As you register (and in January during Drop/Add), remember to use UGAKey.com.  And check back, because we hope to have new and helpful features out soon.

~The UGAKey.com Developers

*Note: This applies only to users of Macs using the Safari web browser (the default browser on a Mac)*

Some Safari (on Mac) users are having trouble filtering grade data and seeing grades.  This issue seems to have popped up when users upgraded to Safari version 4.0.2.  As such, this does not appear to be an issue with UGAKey.com  For most users, the upgrade to Safari version 4.0.3 (typically an automatic upgrade) appears to have fixed the issue.  If you haven’t upgraded to the latest version of Safari, please do so (good instructions here).

If you are using Safari version 4.0.3 and continue to have problems with UGAKey.com, please contact us immediately and include your operating system and version of Safari.  You might try using another web browser, like the free and open source Firefox, to get the full experience.

We apologize for any trouble this has caused you during drop/add and we will keep an eye on the problems.

~The UGAKey.com Developers

The links:

• iCal format
• xml
• html

For more information, see this post.

I’m putting it up because it is incredibly hard to find on the Registrar’s website in the hopes of helping a few students out there.

The easiest way to use the final exam schedule is to check the bottom to see if you have any mass exams (typically Accounting, Chemistry, French, Spanish, Italian, German, MSIT, and Physics classes). See when those exams are given. Then, use the scheduled class time for each of your other classes to determine the exam date and time.

For all other major dates, check this Registrar page.

A couple of quick fixes:

• Give the pages a little while to load. Some spreadsheets are extremely large (the English department spreadsheet comes to mind) and they take a long time to load, even on fast systems.
• Make sure you have javascript enabled (click here for some help enabling javascript).
• Try updating Windows and update Internet Explorer. IE 5 has real troubles loading UGAKey, so update if you can. Windows Update is the place to do all of this.
• Uninstall extra toolbars you might not need (they take up a lot of computer power and keep the javascript in UGAKey from working).
• Scan and clean spyware and adware from your computer (Ad-Aware and Spybot-Search & Destroy are a good start).

These recommendations work for any web browser on any system. The spreadsheets in UGAKey take a lot of computer power to display, so slower computers have more trouble loading them.