Students will now be able to check the syllabi for their classes before registering for them.

Junior Joseph Marcus and senior Jacob Novick created a new website, called Syllabi Central, that provides students with course syllabi before they register.

The site went live last Friday, with 159 syllabi posted. Since then, the number of syllabi has grown to 173. There are another 30 syllabi pending faculty approval.

Many students expect that this will help them with the registration process.

“I think I would use the website. I have a lot of classes to cram in. It would be good to know what I am getting into before I start taking the class. It’s good to know the workload,” said sophomore Eve Surcobe said.

Marcus and Novick first thought of the idea in 2009. They were frustrated by the waitlists to get into classes that interested them.

They realized that students were signing up for classes that they were not sure they actually wanted to take, and then were dropping them during the first couple of weeks of the semester.

The two thought that if students were provided with course syllabi prior to registration, students would be less likely to sign up for classes that they were not going to actually stay in.

At the time, Marcus and Novick were both Student Union senators and began to discuss the idea with their colleagues on the Academic Affairs Committee.

Marcus and Novick originally launched Syllabi Central as a private website hosted by Google in the spring of 2009. The university asked the pair to take it down because the syllabi were the intellectual property of the university.

They then began to work to put the site up on the university server.

Because the website relies on student uploads for content, it is still in its infancy.

“I think Syllabi Central doesn’t have enough syllabi right now. It doesn’t have anything I want to take next year,” sophomore Andreas Mitchell said. “I’m going to put the syllabi from my classes up there; I think it will be in good shape by next fall.”

Marcus and Novick encourage students to submit syllabi from courses that they have taken.

Once a student submits a syllabus, Marcus and Novick contact that course’s instructor to receive permission to post it on the site.

They hope that each academic department will ultimately have an administrator who submits all of the department’s syllabi to the website.

Because syllabi are always changing, the site will require constant maintenance.

“This is a growing resource. Over time it is going to grow and flourish, even if students don’t see the syllabus they want right now. If we stop today, in a year and a half it will be completely useless,” Marcus said.

Marcus says that he expects the site to be used in conjunction with other resources including course descriptions, course evaluations and word of mouth.

“This is just adding a tool to the toolbox,” Marcus said. “We see this as the fourth hammer in the toolbox.”

Freshman Sarah Kloepper says that the website will help her to scope out course content before she registers.

“It gives you an idea of the class before you take the classes,” Kloepper said, “Especially for the literature classes, since you don’t know what the readings are going to be a lot of times.”

Still, Kloepper says that seeing a course syllabus prior to registration would not necessarily affect her decision to register for it.

Some students think that the website is unnecessary given current resources.

“I probably won’t use it. The class listings on webSTAC are usually sufficient. I also talk to students who have taken those classes beforehand, so I know what it’s like,” senior Alex Mentch said.

Novick hopes that the site will eventually become as commonly used as resources like WebSTAC.

“Overall people are going to be able to make more informed registration decisions and will be able to enjoy themselves more,” Novick said. “We just want it to be part of the culture. We want it to eventually be as commonplace as course descriptions are in registration.”

Syllabi Central can be found at syllabicentral.wustl.edu/.

With additional reporting by Wei-Yin Ko.