Course Selection & Electives in College: Don’t Just Pick the Easy Stuff
By: The College Confidant
Tags: College, University, Gpa, Courses, Electives

Look I get it. Depending on your program/major, the amount of flexibility you have with electives or the number of coursers you can pick will be different. And of course everyone wants to get the highest GPA that they can achieve.

Having accepted that reality, it will be tempting to use those spots to pick courses that are some times called ‘bird courses’, meaning very easy courses.

You might feel that your mandatory or core courses are more important and that you shouldn’t burden yourself additionally with the challenge of another course you have to take seriously, so you want to settle for a course where you can proverbially ‘take the foot off the gas’.

Grades feel like the be-all, end-all for many students, especially those who need to rely on their GPA for entry into other programs, such as pre-med or pre-law students, or relying on it to get a top internship at a investment bank or a tech company or whatever.

These feelings are completely rational to have, however let’s dive deeper.

The Problem With “Easy Courses”

If you look at your university’s major social media or forum discussion where these bird or easy courses are discussed, the prevailing themes that seem to come up with these kinds of courses are that the exams are available before hand, whether connected to a particular textbook or just re-used year after year, that the professor is a very generous marker and hands out many A’s, or that the subject matter and/or style of testing is straightforward.

“Was Easy” Doesn’t Guarantee “Will Be Easy”

One immediate problem is obviously that of risk. If based on the anecdotes of other students you take a particular course, believing that this professor is inclined to re-use the same exams over and over, making it easy for you to prepare and get a high mark, and then the Professor decides to change it up this year and the final exam ends up being something completely different and you do poorly, well guess what. You can’t say, “ Hey what happened to keeping this course easy and predictable prof?”. Of course if you applied the same rigor to this course as you do with your other courses, then this new exam wouldn’t be a big deal for you, and you aren’t at any risk. But then the question is why even take this course, when you could have taken just about anything else?

“Information Symmetry and Competition”

There’s also another risk with these courses, in the sense that everyone also equally knows about these same set of courses. There is information symmetry. If everyone with the same objective as you, to capitalize on the perceived ease of this course tries to take it and execute the same strategy, then can every student leave the course with a grade close to 100%? The reality is probably no. Different schools have different grading policies and grading curves, but it’s almost inevitable that some of the students in that class will have to receive a lower mark than others, even if that mark is artificially rendered. And on what basis will that lower mark be received? On the basis of the marks of the students relative to each other. That means that even in the easy course where you feel everything is predetermined to get an A, you are still technically competing with the other students in that class for the A, so that ‘foot off the gas’ isn’t really at play, and in many cases you might be competing against students who are just as hungry for the high grades as you are with your goals.

“The Opportunity Cost of Not Actually Learning”

Another problem is genuine learning and skill development. If you are taking a course where you consciously know either the material is completely not going to help you in the future, or maybe the material is useful but the way you are going to prepare for the course (for instance by memorizing exam questions and answers rather than conventional studying) is not going to make you really learn anything, you are hurting yourself in the long run. The reason is that today, all economies as they develop and technology advances, are going to become what’s called knowledge economies, and this extends to the opportunities available for entrepreneurs and employees in the marketplace. This means that jobs whether private or in government are going to be more and more reliant on knowledge, information, and high-level skills. And by not using your education, even these elective courses, to make yourself more competitive in this market, you are doing yourself a disservice.

And going back to this idea of your goals and where grades fit into them. Even for the student that is dead set on getting into medical school, that student is still better off putting in a little bit more effort into a course that expands their skill and knowledge base and thus makes them a better candidate for medical school, than taking a course that does nothing for their competencies but just has a higher probability of getting an A+, a 4.0, or whatever.

The Valuable Course Selection Framework

So with that having been said, what things should you consider when picking a course? Well the obvious one I think is the best one, pick something that interests you. There is no doubt that as a student, you are curious and you want to learn about different things, and that your curiosity stretches beyond whatever your major is. If you’re in engineering , you might have always wanted to pick up another language, if you’re in psychology, you may have always had a thing for formally learning about music. If you take something that you are interested in, you will want to learn and when you want to learn, you will learn. And guess what, if you are motivated and taking your learning seriously, there's a good chance the good marks will follow too.

This is going to sound slightly contradictory to the last point, but sometimes the professor can be more important than the topic of the course. In fact, there may be an area of study that you don’t particularly care about, but the professor of the course could be such an incredible person, a world renowned expert in that area, that taking the course will be a great opportunity. A professor that is incredibly knowledgeable, insightful and personable, can completely make what seems to be a mundane field turn into a fascinating one. Beyond the book and assigned material, you will feel like you have a special resource that you have access to and want to learn from and connect with and impress, and that will motivate you to work hard and do well in the course. That’s why if you are looking at online discussions of what courses to take at your college, you shouldn’t look for discussions of easy courses but rather posts and discussions that praise and speak highly of different professors.

One last criterion you might want to think about is the type of deliverable or assessment that different courses have. It might be beneficial to try and take courses that have unique assessments from your usual exams, papers and presentations. For instance, a course that requires a video project or a course where you work with or advise a real world client or company. One advantage of these courses is that they will force you to build up a skill that you haven’t been exercising regularly for your courses, since you are mainly used to exams, papers, and presentations. The other more important advantage is that at the end of these classes you have something to show for your efforts. You can literally show the work you did on a university application, at a job interview, or anywhere else you want, which you can’t really do with an exam (and it wouldn’t particularly stand out with an paper if it wasn’t published in academia). The fact that your efforts can be put on display later on as a glimpse of your capabilities will again likely push to you to worker harder and do better, so that you don’t need to worry about taking an easy course for a grade.

So when its time to pick your courses and electives, I hope you keep these things in mind. Your education is at the end of the day your journey, and so it’s all based on your choices. If you feel more comfortable with the bird course route do that, but if you feel you want more out of your courses than just the GPA, at least consider a more diverse set of criteria like the ones I mentioned.