- Schedule Finder
- General Education Requirement Course Search
- Suggested General Education Courses
- Course Catalog Search
- New Courses and Special Offerings
- Enrollment Summary
- Course Evaluation Catalog
- Instructor Course Descriptions
- Department Homepages
- Sit in on a Class
Schedule Finder
If you know which courses you want to take, the online Schedule Finder can help you choose the right sections of each class so that they don’t overlap.
Select the appropriate quarter, then enter the department abbreviations and course numbers of the courses you want. If you’re already registered for one or more courses and you want to keep the sections you’re already in, you can “lock” those sections by entering the department, course number, and section letters, and the Schedule Finder will fit your other courses around your current course(s).
If you like, you can enter an earliest start time and a latest end time. It’s also a good idea to check the box marked “Check to exclude course sections requiring Entry Codes.” The computer will then ignore sections that are open but have restrictions, such as sections reserved for FIGs.
Submit your request, and the Schedule Finder will come back with a list of possible combinations. It lists only the first ten, so if you want to see more options you may have to adjust the information you’re giving it. If you like one of the combinations, you can register for it by clicking the “Register for this Schedule” button located above each combination.
You can easily get to the Schedule Finder from the Registration page in MyUW. It goes live one week before Period 1 registration begins.
General Education Requirement Course Search
The General Education Requirement Course Search helps you to find all open courses that meet selected General Education Requirements. For example, if you want to take an Individuals and Societies (I&S) course, but don’t know exactly which one, you can search for all open I&S courses between selected times and find out all your options.
First, select the right quarter. Then, choose the requirement you’d like to search for from the drop-down menu. You can enter an earliest starting time, latest ending time, a credit range (e.g., 3-5 credits), a course range (e.g., 100-level, 200-level, etc.), and can choose to exclude courses requiring Entry Codes, prerequisites, and courses with registration restrictions (this is often a good idea). You can also indicate the minimum number of credits you want each class to be worth.
When you click the button “Find Open Courses,” the computer will return a list of currently open courses that fit your criteria. A couple of things to note:
- The list starts at the beginning of the day (or the time you selected) and goes through to the end of the day (or the time you selected).
- Most courses with prerequisites will say “Check prerequisites” in the Notes column.
- The SLN, Title, and Notes columns are hyperlinked; click on them to find out more about the class.
- Only the lecture section is listed. Most courses also require you to sign up for a quiz section, and you’ll need to look in the Time Schedule to find one that works for you.
- This document is often many pages long; don’t forget to click on “More” at the bottom.
- Each search you request is performed in "real time." If you do another search 10 minutes later, you may come up with a course that just opened because another student just dropped it.
You can get to the General Education Requirement Course Search from the Registration page in MyUW.
Suggested General Education Courses
This tool provides lists of primarily 100- and 200-level introductory courses (mostly, courses with no prerequisites) that you might consider in order to satisfy a VLPA, I&S, or NW requirement.
The courses listed here are a subset of the courses you would get if you used the "General Education Requirement Course Search" function above, so if you want to see all your options, including ones with prerequisites, you should use that search instead. The advantage of the Suggested Course list is that it doesn't include a lot of upper-division specialized courses. It's a good list to look at to get ideas of the kinds of courses students take to satisfy the Areas of Knowledge requirement.
To get to these lists from the top of the Time Schedule click “Registration Resources” then “Suggested General Education Courses.”
Course catalog search
By entering keywords into the Course Catalog search, you can find courses in your area of interest. For example, you could search for courses that include a word or phrase such as "robotics," "Indonesia," or "animal behavior." The computer will return a list of departments that offer at least one course with that keyword in the title or course description. Choose the department you'd like to investigate first, then click on "Cached" near the end of the listing. You'll get a list of the courses offered by that department with your keyword(s) highlighted in color. You can then check the Time Schedule to see if a particular course is being offered this quarter.You can access the Course Catalog search from the Registration page in MyUW.
New Courses and Special Offerings
The New Courses and Special Offerings sites list brand-new courses, special offerings by visiting scholars, and selected special topics courses. These courses, often some of the most unique the University of Washington has to offer, are many times overlooked by students because the of the huge number of courses offered each quarter.
Enrollment Summary
The Enrollment Summary lists the current number of seats available in all courses offered by a single department. For example, if you want to take an anthropology course but want more up-to-date information than the open/closed shading in the Time Schedule (which is updated only once a day, around midnight), you can click on "Enrollment Summary" and see the number of seats available right now in each anthropology course.
NOTE: The enrollment summaries for the larger departments (such as mathematics and English) may take several seconds to appear, so be patient. It takes the computer a little time to prepare a summary because, unlike the open/closed shading in the Time Schedule itself, this report is real time data.
The Enrollment Summary for each department is available near the top of that department's page in the Time Schedule.Course Evaluation Catalog
You can use the Course Evaluation Catalog to find out the student ratings for the various instructors of a course you are planning to take. The Instructional Assessment System is used to collect and summarize student ratings of instruction, and is used in more than 8,000 courses annually at the UW. The Course Evaluation Catalog is an online summary of this information.
Remember that the numbers are only one indication of course quality and should be interpreted with caution. For example, students who do better in the course may tend to give instructors higher ratings. An "A" student may say difficulty was low and workload about right, while others who did poorly may not.
It's also helpful to consider that any sample group will have its own biases that could distort the numbers. Consider the number of students who participated in the survey and the response rates that appear in the survey. Ratings for a class of 100 with only 3 responses turned in are much less representative of the class as a whole than are ratings for a class of 100 where 94 surveys were returned.
You can access the Course Evaluation Catalog from the Registration page in MyUW by clicking on Student Guide, then scroll down to the Selecting Courses section.
