3-A. Academic Administration

2022-09-16

Note: Advisor, course selection, courses, override, critique, exam, travel, grade, marks, program, major, minor, option, specialization, summer break

Skip table of contents

• Academic Advisors
• Courses
  • Course Codes
  • Multiple Lecture Sections
  • Switching Sections
  • Overrides
    • Engineering
    • CS
    • Other
  • Critiques
  • Grievances
• Examinations
  • Logistics
    • Accomodations
    • Exam Relief
  • Materials
  • Writing an Exam
    • Timeline
  • Missing an Exam
• Grades
• Programs
  • Switching Programs
  • Honours
  • Graduate School
  • Degree Extras
  • Breaks
• Conclusion

This is a footnote for the series on the first year experience at the University of Waterloo.

Today’s topic will be on how to navigate the administration when it comes to academics in ECE.

The UW administration is at its best when there are no exceptions, emergencies, or urgency. Additionally, it is slow and generally pretty apathetic, so it is up to you to ensure things are moving along and getting done. If there is a problem, don’t expect anyone to notice until you bring it to their attention. In contrast, someone in the administration might notice there’s a problem and you will get spammed by emails until you resolve it.

# Academic Advisors

For first year, the first year engineering office is your first point of contact for everything. For upper years, the academic advisors are your first point of contact when it comes to courses. Make sure you are emailing the correct address, that the request is as simple as possible, and you have provided enough context and background information. To make it easier, you can also add your student number in your email.

The academic advisors are dealing with all of the students in the department, so it is frustrating for everyone involved if they have to ask you for information and you have to reply, causing delays as every single exchange takes a few days. In general, before emailing or asking questions, it’s good to do some research on your own, as it will save both your time and the time of the other person.

As these are emails, don’t expect instantaneous responses. If a deadline is tomorrow, it’s probably too late (but you can try anyway).

Douglas Harder has some good advice in his advising corner.

# Courses

# Course Codes

Course codes follow a numbering pattern:

• The digit in the hundreds place denotes the level, but it’s not guaranteed that a 1 is for first year, 2 is for second year, etc. You can take any course regardless of its code as long as you meet the pre-requisites or get an override.

  • A digit of 5 or greater (AKA higher than 4) denotes graduate courses which can be significantly more work than undergraduate courses. A good approximation is that a graduate course takes 1.5-2x as much work. However, if there are very few students taking the graduate course, it may be possible to ask the professor for a more lenient grading scheme.

• In ECE, the digits in the tens place denotes the course group/theme.

0. General math (e.g. calculus, statistics, logic) and science (e.g. physics, chemistry)
1. Communication systems (signals)
2. Digital logic and computers (gate and register level)
3. Physical properties of electronic devices (e.g. components, material, manufacture)
4. Electrical circuits, including forming digital gates
5. Software and programming
6. Power (circuits handling lots of power over large distances)
7. Radio frequency (RF) and waves
8. Control and feedback systems
9. Design projects and miscellaneous

The undergraduate calendar also used to have the hours per week for classes, tutorials, and labs under column headings Cls, Tut, Lab respectively.

# Multiple Lecture Sections

Courses with multiple sections usually have a course coordinator who decides what the exams are going to be like. This means that while each professor has their own style of lectures and notes, the content will be mostly the same. If you don’t like a professor’s style, you can always try to attend a different lecture section (just show up). Make sure you keep up with administrative information from your own section.

# Switching Sections

Typically students switch sections due to conflicts with electives, a preferred professor, and/or lab times.

Switching sections in ECE is difficult as there are many students which causes all sections to fill completely. The easiest method is to find someone from a different section who is willing to swap with you, and then emailing the academic advisors and CCing the student willing to switch. Then get the other student to reply all to that email with their consent. Make sure you indicate which sections you’re swapping (e.g. course and lecture/lab/tutorial).

If there is a time conflict that would prevent a switch, it is much more difficult to have it approved by an academic advisor. You have to justify why the time conflict will not interfere with both courses. Conflicts with tutorials are less severe than conflicts with labs or lectures.

# Overrides

Overrides are required when you are unable to add a course yourself on Quest, either during the course selection period or the add/drop period. This is usually caused by missing pre-requisites (including “at least” level), course limit reached (usually on co-op terms), and/or the policy of the course’s department.

Below are the steps I have taken when I attempted to override (the process may have changed since then). Depending on the department, you need the permission of the professor, the academic advisor, or both.

# Engineering

The process is easy:

1. (Optional) Email the academic advisors first, giving an administrative justification why you should be able to enroll (e.g. pre-requisite course was replaced by equivalent courses that you already took). You might be able to short-cut past asking the professor this way. Otherwise, proceed to step 2.
2. Email the professor asking for permission to take the course. Introduce yourself, provide the reason why you can’t enroll on your own (e.g. missing pre-requisites), and justification for why you can take the course (e.g. can learn over the current term, equivalent courses).
3. Forward the professor’s permission to the ECE academic advisors.
4. The academic advisors will enroll you, assuming no time conflicts.
   • If there are time conflicts, you also have to justify why those won’t affect either course academically.

# CS

As CS courses are popular, it is difficult to enroll in courses as a non-CS student. Luckily, the faculty of engineering has an agreement with the CS department to allow engineering students to enroll after reserves are removed.

1. Meet the requirements of FAQ 10 (formerly FAQ 78).
2. Wait until one week has passed since start of classes. If the term started on 2nd (as in the first day of classes), the earliest possible eligible date to enroll is the 9th (which means you should sign up for the 9th on the day before, see below).
3. Sign up for CS advising office hours.
   • You should do this a day in advance as lines can be long.
4. Once an advisor gets to you, follow the procedure for identification.
5. Ask to be enrolled in the CS course.
6. The advisor will check space, then your academics.
7. If you meet requirements you will be given a permission number. Enroll in the course through Quest with the permission number.
   • If you already selected an elective make sure you choose “swap” rather than “add” (I accidentally did this and got the too many units error).
   • If you have time conflicts with another course the CS advisor will have to contact the ECE advisors to resolve the issue. Expect delays and be ready to remind them when close to the add/drop deadline. Justification will need to be provided as usual.
8. The professor was not involved in this process.

# Other

Search for the department the course belongs to and try to find instructions for enrolling. Follow them if you find any. Otherwise, contact the academic advisor(s) of that department. If you can’t find contact information, email the ECE academic advisors.

# Critiques

Course critiques (now known as Student Course Perceptions (SCP)) are the feedback mechanism for professors. There are other ECE surveys that will appear in your inbox for lab instructors and TAs. Fill them out! You can also find previous course critiques and SCPs when deciding which electives to take. Personally, I’ve stopped worrying about courses and instead sigh in resignation when I see a bad professor assigned to a core course.

Also apparently the reason why these are done before final exams is because the course is preceived less favourably immediately after exams. It’s almost as if students don’t like exams, especially bad exams…

# Grievances

Your academic reps are your first point of contact if you want to change something about the course (e.g. add an extension to an assignment deadline). The next point of contact would be the department. For ECE, that would be the associate dean. After that, you have to file a policy 70 grievance.

Professors have a huge amount of power over how they run their courses, which is typical for universities. Unfortunately, this means that if a professor refuses to budge on an issue, there is little the academic reps, departments, or faculties can do. While grievances can be filed, UW administration is slow and it’s unlikely that the issue will be resolved by the end of the term. Additionally, grievances are unlikely to make progress since the ruling will just point to the course outline/syllabus (e.g. as ECE 318 students found out when the professor allowed students to drop a quiz grade and then suddenly changed his position and made the last quiz mandatory). Even worse, some professors have tenure which means there are no consequences for them.

The reason why bad professors are still allowed to teach is because there are literally teaching minimums in their contract with UW, and the department has to figure out how to limite the damage by choosing which courses to sacrifice (unfortunately for the students taking those courses). Changing this requires going to the Senate, which will require a huge amount of effort, involve a large number of people, and potentially take years if not at least a decade.

Because of the freedom each professor has over their courses, a course taught by one professor may be very different from the same course taught by a different professor. Unfortunately in ECE, when a bad professor is assigned to a core course you are taking, there is nothing you can do about it (other than maybe trying to go to the other lecture section, if you’re lucky enough to have multiple sections).

# Examinations

Exams are typically worth the majority of your grade. This is because the ECE department has a rule that the minimum weight of the final exam must be 50%. This comes from accreditation requirements that at least 50% of a course must grade independent work.

The 50% rule is obviously overkill, and work is being done to remove it. Some professors have already reduced the weight of their final exams or removed them outright, which is allowed because they have “instructional discretion” to do so (as professors get a lot of freedom in how they run their courses). Unfortunately, new professors have to abide by this rule, and some professors have kept the large weight or even worse, made it so that you have to pass the exams to pass the course.

I don’t like the exam model because all it does is prove that I can memorize most of the course content in less than 48 hours and then immediately forget it (MATH 115). Nothing kills interest more than having 50% of your grade is based off of an exam with hard questions. Don’t let it get to you.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

# Logistics

Midterm exams and their schedules are handled by either the first year engineering office or the ECE department for upper years.

Final exams and their schedules are handled by the Registrar’s Office. Usually the first iteration of the schedule is out by the second month of the term, and will continue to be updated as the examination period approaches. Check the final exam schedule often.

TODO: Verify that the schedules come out on the last day of course selection. F22: 2022-10-03

Assume that there is no correlation between examination schedules of different terms. Scheduling is hard and every term is different, so you can’t guess the next term/year’s exam schedule based on previous schedules.

The time of a midterm exam is usually 75 minutes (1.25 hours) and for final exams it’s usually 150 minutes (2.5 hours).

# Accomodations

UW has recently been very focused on accomodating students with disabilities and providing accessability. If you need accomodations for exams, ask the professor and contact AccessAbility.

TODO: More detail, unfortunately I don’t have much information about this

# Exam Relief

If you have multiple exams in a short period of time, you can contact the professor and ask if you can write them at a different time. However, professors are reluctant to do this because it involves more work (creating a new exam, grading a new exam, finding a room, finding a TA to supervise). Otherwise, you will have to go through official channels.

For final exams, you go through the Registrar’s Office to request relief or claim a conflict and have some of them moved. You have to do this two months in advance.

TODO: Personal experience on many exams in a row

# Materials

Exams are usually closed-book (but some do include a formula sheet), and the only materials you are allowed to bring are writing utensils and a clear water bottle without a label. Some courses allow additional materials, such as calculators (more detail in the Onboarding article), cheat sheets (a specified amount), or even make it open-book (which is cause for concern).

The reason why math courses do not allow calculators is so that students don’t spend time on computation and focus instead on actually solving the problem. Unfortunately, my mental math is bad so I lose all the marks on stupid arithmetic mistakes instead.

Note to self: e^t * e^t != e^(t^2)

# Writing an Exam

For the many different theorems and equations, you are expected to:

• Memorize them.
• Truly have an understanding of what they mean and represent to the point of intuition.
• Know when and where to apply them to a question.
• Know the correct one to apply for the fastest and most efficient solution.
• Learn new ones that could be applied to old problems and learn new problems that the old ones can be applied to.

Except in engineering replace “theorems” with “integral-derivative pairs”.

# Timeline

The day before:

• Prepare your pencil case/bag/whatever with the materials allowed on the exam. Don’t forget your calculator if you’re allowed one.
• Set your alarm.
• Get a good night’s sleep.
  • Sleep is important! Your brain is compiling and organizing all of the information you studied.
  • If you only have a couple of hours before the exam it might be better to just stay up. Students have missed their exam because they overslept.

The day of:

• Don’t do any last minute studying, this will ruin your brain’s organization.
• Bring your materials.
• Arrive a few minutes early (preferably 5-10).
• Turn off your phone. It’s embarassing when your phone goes off and you have to get the TA or professor to watch you as you shut it off. Also annoying and distracting when someone else’s phone goes off while you’re trying to concentrate.

During the exam:

• Typically you’re allowed in up to an hour into the exam. Otherwise you’ve missed it.
• You can’t leave during the first hour and the last 10 minutes.
• Please keep sobbing down to avoid disturbing other students.
• If the fire alarm goes off, follow the proctor’s instructions. Definitely not a safety risk.
• Randomly forget an important theorem and get screwed on a question worth 20% of the exam.
  • Bonus if you were about to remember it and a phone goes off causing you to forget.
• I have never seen this question in my life and I have no idea how to solve it.

TODO: Draw comic PAC on fire this is fine and then link it here

After the exam:

• WTF were those questions.
• Spontaneously remember what that theorem was and now you know exactly how to solve that question.
• “Did you get [answer] on [question]? No? Oh crap.”
• Maybe I will get part marks :copium:
• Get back to work, you have another harder exam tomorrow.

TODO: draw the emoji and then link it here

# Missing an Exam

“Bro were going into the exam where r u (15 hours ago)” “Haha nice try dude the exams tomorrow (now)”

Contact the professor, preferably by email, ASAP. The professor might be able to accomodate you or move the weight onto the final exam instead of giving you 0%. If the reason is because of illness, you might need to fill and submit a Verification of Illness Form (VIF) if asked for one.

Travel plans are NOT an acceptable excuse for not writing an exam. In general, exams are not rescheduled or delayed as UW doesn’t care about minor disruptions such as blizzards, so a one or two day buffer between the exam and your travel is probably safe.

If you miss a final exam and don’t do anything about it, you will get a grade of DNW (Did not write examination, no credit granted) and are required to withdraw as the faculty of engineering interprets this as abandoning the degree program. Expect a huge amount of stress and work to ask for leniency from this decision.

# Grades

Grades start coming out the day after the final examination period ends, which causes Quest to lag and possibly crash as every student attempt to log in at midnight to see them. Personally, I just enjoy my sleep and take a look in the morning (a few hours isn’t going to change anything). However, this does not guarantee that they’re out by then, and they will eventually trickle in throughout the break and into the next term. The latest a professor is supposed to submit grades is approximately one month after the end of the final examination period, which is a lot of time.

Grades are rounded normally, unless you’re at 49.45% or something like that, in which case you can try asking the professor nicely to round your grade up to 50%. There is a not-insignificant chance that one of your grades is a failing one. This is normal, failing a course is not the end of the world. If you get 40% or higher, then you can write a supplemental exam the next time the course is offered instead of retaking the entire course to clear the failure. However, if a course needs the content from your failed course, you will still need to know the content.

# Programs

Here are some fun facts about programs at UW!

For class of 2023, the class size in 1A was 374 students. In 4A, it was 294 students. So the attrition rate is at least 21.4%, since there are students from the class of 2022 and 2021 dropping into 2023.

You have 7 years to complete your 5 year engineering program. TODO: Source?

There are a bunch of rules on whether you have to withdraw, repeat a term, or can continue in the undergraduate calendar.

# Switching Programs

Until F23, switching between the computer engineering and electrical engineering programs before your 2B term starts is as easy as emailing the academic advisors and filling a form. After F23, it will be just as difficult to switch as between e.g. chemical engineering and architectural engineering. Basically, it will be easy to switch from CE to EE but basically impossible to switch from EE to CE. The ECE department has noticed a large number of EE students switching into CE, so they are completely separating the two programs starting with the class of 2028 (so it will be two separate programs that happen to share courses for the first three terms). The ECE chair said in the S22 ECE town hall that the reason for this change is because UW has an obligation to society to produce EE graduates.

Switching is very hard between other engineering programs, due to limited space and high demand. You need high grades (as students with the higher average get priority) and space to be available. This is what will happen to CE and EE.

# Honours

Honours just means the pass requirements are higher and it takes longer to complete. For ECE, the passing term average is 60% and it takes 8 academic terms to complete. There’s a 3-year general math degree that’s non-honours where the term pass average is 50% instead.

# Graduate School

For applicants: Don’t hyperfocus on grad school before starting undergrad.

Remember, graduate school is a life-changing decision. Instead of going into the workforce and making boatloads of money centring divs, you decide to go into academia and do research. Do some research (heh) on grad school: Talk to professors, talk to TAs, try out an undergraduate research assistantship (URA) position during an academic term, or get an undergraduate student research award (USRA) position for co-op. Maybe you will like it, maybe it’s not for you.

TODO: More detail coming soon on the graduation series!

# Degree Extras

You can get some extra words on your degree by taking a specialization, option, or minor. A specialization is a focus within your program, an option is a focus within your faculty, and a minor is a focus outside of your faculty. Most students graduate and enter the workforce just fine without any of these.

If you are taking one, you must carefully plan your courses in advance for the entirety of your undergraduate career. Not only must you take the required courses from the undergraduate calendar, you have to consider pre-requisites. You might need to override, overload, take courses on co-op, and/or delay graduation. Additionally, you must be able to have contingencies in case you are not able to take a course. In the worst case, you might not be able to complete it. Itachi (MGTE 2024) has an excellent guide with an example.

Personally, I am taking the AI option, which has the bonus pain of requiring at least one override into a course from the faculty of math (which also have pre-requisites!). Also, I was very lucky because I was able to take many courses online instead of in-person during co-op. This means that my experience is not reproducible.

Was it worth it? Not really.

# Breaks

Co-op terms are a nice break because I only have to work 40 hours a week at very clearly demarcated times.

The only breaks you get are the few weeks between terms. In general:

• Fall: 1 reading week, 2 weeks between last final exam to start of winter term (your winter break).
• Winter: 1 reading week, 1 week between last final exam to start of spring term (what break?).
• Spring: No reading week*, 3 weeks between last final exam to start of fall term (your summer break).

*It’s supposed to be covered by holidays but there are only three of them and holidays still exist in the other terms, so I speculate that the administration and professors want their summer vacation at the end of the year.

# Conclusion

The important information to take away is to know how the UW academic administration operates.

Check out:

• 3-E. Employment
• 3-4. 1B