course-schedule-status-quo-thumb.png The existing course schedule is the result of years of accretions of accommodations to the needs of individual programs and even instructors. Some of its pathologies lie in how it is administered and "enforced" (as in, it isn't), but it also suffers from the absence of deliberate design. One contributing factor is probably that no one in the institution actually "sees" it. The closest we have to an experience of its shape and form is the hassle students experience when looking for courses and the experience of the registrar when trying to assign classrooms. We will begin, therefor, by visualizing the status quo.
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AND HERE is a picture of a single semester to show how the choice problem faced by students is much less a matter of choosing 4 courses out of several hundred but rather of choosing four courses from about 20 buckets of simultaneous courses:

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