<p>How much say do advisers have in your course selection in college? Do they really just advise you, or is it like high school where they can veto any of your decisions? I was looking on the website to the college I'm planning on going to, and it looks like I'll have an average of 4 credit hours per semester leftover after meeting course requirements for a major and a minor. I never did much in high school, so I'd like to use those credits for "fun" classes - martial arts, piano, tap dance, etc... In general, would an adviser let me do that, or would they try to force me into taking on a double major or another minor?</p>
<p>The advisor should keep you on track to take the courses you need for your major and to fulfill all other requirements to ensure you graduate. If you want to spread your college career out over 4.5 or 5 years instead of 4, switch majors, take extra electives, etc., then that’s your choice if you can afford it. They may vary in how much they try to push you to take one class over another, but at the end of the day, YOU are paying for your courses, and you are the one handing in your selection to the registrar’s office.</p>
<p>In short, they advise you to consider certain options, but they cannot “veto” you.</p>
<p>In my experience, college academic advisers have zero say in what classes you can and cannot take, provided you meet the prerequisites (or any other requirements) for the course.</p>
<p>You may have to get approval for some classes from department advisers (for instance, at my school, some classes required departmental approval, usually because they were restricted for students in a particular major), but if you want to take some random class, no one is going to stop you, unless your violating some requirement (like you’re going over the allowed units you’re allowed to take or some other thing that requires a petition or approval).</p>
<p>When I was in college, I only spoke to my adviser twice in my four years there: once when they required us to talk to them during freshman orientation and once when they required me to get approval for a double major. At no point did they have any power over what courses I took. Your experience may be different at another school, but odds are you can take all the fun classes you want, as long as you still graduate within the unit limit your school has.</p>
<p>My advisees cannot register unless I give them an approval code which means that I can prevent a student from enrolling in a certain course, even if s/he technically meets all the requirements. I’ve never had to do this: my advisees trust my judgment (I see all of them frequently–we often have lunch together and things like that) and so when I tell them that Course A is not a good idea and that Course B is better, they will follow my suggestion. When it comes to elective credits I wouldn’t try and veto a student’s choice unless I had serious reservations about the instructor of record or strongly believed that a student would be outmatched in the class.</p>
<p>@SLACFac</p>
<p>I’m kind of glad to hear you’ve never used that power - as a student it’d make me uncomfortable that any advisor could control what kind of courses I took. I say that as a transfer as well, where, prior to honors courses, I’d ran into multiple conflicting advice issues. Advisor should be as the definition of the word: someone who offers advice, not someone who ‘decides’ what I’m going to take. You sound like you’re using that power very responsibly - I would hope others at your Uni do the same. When you say “they follow my suggestions” - the first thing that comes to mind is “so if they didn’t you’d block enrollment?” The path down that road is disquieting.</p>
<p>Like SLACFac, I advised students who need to get a PIN code from me in order to register. My role is that of expert consultant - I am familiar with the core requirements and major requirements, and I can guide students on how best to fill those. But the student is ultimately in charge of their own decisions: I’ve had students who hate math and who ignored my advice to take their math requirement semester after semester only to have to take it during their last semster, or worse yet, after they “should have” graduated. But as long as you fill the university requirements and the major requirements, I don’t really have a stake in what you choose for elective courses.</p>
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<p>Why would this be such a bad thing? Sure, maybe the kid is setting themselves up for a situation where they have to burn the midnight oil just to pass, but at least they’re learning something. Better that than they take something trivial just for some credits. </p>
<p>I realize, as you’ve said, that you’ve never actually done so, but why would you do so?</p>
<p>I’ve never had problems with advising. Whenever I’ve seen the adviser she’s been very nice and friendly and hasn’t had a problem with me taking whatever I wanted, even without meeting whatever prerequisites they listed. (Note to universities - Stop it with listing irrelevant prerequisites) But others have told me that they’ve had problems with the same adviser as I have causing them problems when they’ve tried to do the same things as I’ve done. </p>
<p>For instance, there’s a graduate class I took sophomore year. A friend of mine tried to take the same class junior year. They would have been better prepared for it than me at the time, yet (she claims) that the adviser removed her from the class multiple times when she registered for it and sent her an email saying that she can’t take it because she’s not a graduate student. This was the same semester as well, so it’s not as if there was a policy change or anything like that. Another friend told me that she wouldn’t let him declare the major because she believed he was only declaring it to get into a class reserved for majors and would declare afterwards (he was admittedly - but I or anyone else easily could have been doing the same when declaring). Another friend said she wouldn’t let him take the intro classes freshman year, which I took freshman year (again - same semester so no policy change). </p>
<p>So… I guess here advisers can make things difficult for students, but it’s never happened to me, though to people I know.</p>
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<p>Given the general requirements of my institution our students don’t have a lot of room for error–if they have to take a W or receive an F (or a D/F in the major) that means they have to either take classes in the summer, which can prove difficult if a student needs to work, has financial issues, or has an interesting internship opportunity that overlaps summer semesters, OR they have to load up on extra credits in other semesters. At my institution, having to take credit overloads or having credit hour issues can also affect a student’s ability to do an in-semester internship or study abroad. Academically adept students can do credit overloads easily, but a student who is forced into an overload because s/he struggled earlier is likely to continue to struggle in that pressure situation. </p>
<p>I feel I have a duty to my students to prevent them from creating self-imposed obstacles to graduation, especially in their first three semesters, when many of them may still be dealing with a bit of magical thinking when it comes to their actual ability to succeed in certain types of courses. When I see that our institutional data indicate that 95% of students below a certain SAT-M threshold will get a C/D/F/W in a particular course, if my advisee is below that threshold and doesn’t have a compelling story otherwise, I believe that I should strongly advise that student to take another course. Sometimes this can be difficult because the students at my institution do tend to overestimate their ability to overcome factors that indicate they will struggle in certain types of classes, so I have found that a firmer hand is sometimes necessary. </p>
<p>To answer RevelleRaiser directly, no, I would never actually block enrollment. However, if I strongly felt that a junior/senior advisee of mine was making a choice that, in my judgment, would probably delay his or her graduation, I would make him or her sign documentation stating that s/he was acting against my specific advice in order to protect myself if s/he did, in fact, fail to graduate on time.</p>
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<p>Okay, this sounds perfectly reasonable to me. </p>
<p>What do you think of an adviser removing someone from a class or blocking enrollment in a class when a student has not taken their advice? I’m asking as you have a different perspective on it given that you’re an adviser.</p>
<p>I have enough trouble making sure my scheduling for four years works out. I don’t want an advisor ready to pounce on the Independent Thought Alarm button just because I’m doing an atypical schedule.</p>
<p>For me personally, my advisers have no veto power. I have to meet with them to actually be able to register for my major classes before everyone else and I have to meet with my primary adviser to get my PIN to register for other classes, but in general, they just tell me what I need to take to graduate, which I can actually find for myself online. So, yea. Mostly they’re fun to talk to.</p>
<p>Seems like the advisor doing the job well is less likely to tell the student not to take a certain course than to try to convince a student to take a certain course needed to graduate on time.</p>
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<p>Well, I have only ever been at institutions where advising is carried out by the faculty, and all these institutions have also held to the norm that it is the right of the instructor of record to refuse to admit a student who does not have the prerequisites, suggest a withdrawal, etc. </p>
<p>I do not think it would be appropriate for an adviser–especially one who was not a faculty member–to veto a course or to forcibly remove a student from a course unless the student had somehow managed to register without having the appropriate prerequisite/an instructor override or something like that. However, I maintain that advisers can and should offer firm advice, especially for students who have been struggling, and they should also make their advisees explicitly take responsibility for decisions that may delay graduation or create financial issues. (Remember, most professors are at institutions where retention is a big deal and there is a possibility that an adviser may face pressures if his or her advisees are not graduating on time, even if the reason that they are not doing so is because they ignored his/her suggestions.)</p>
<p>Keep in mind that advising students who want to do unique things with their schedules because they are very accomplished and talented is a very different game than advising students who are making unique scheduling decisions because they have been struggling. Most of the cases that most professors deal with are examples of the latter, not the former.</p>