Spreadsheet gaming

SPREADSHEET GAMING

A THEORETICAL 1 - YEAR GRADUATION

Written by Keanu Hua

August 25th, 2022: My fourth day ever of being on a university campus.

I found out that double degrees exist, and I remembered that in this god-forsaken economy, a single bachelor’s degree isn’t enough anymore. Or something.

After two semesters of work, ridiculous amounts of Japanese pop music, and several Google searches, I have gained an unnecessary amount of knowledge of school mechanics and several obscure university policies.

Statistics major I am, but my heart lies with people – journalism, psychology, sociology. Statistics, to me, is a mathematical variation of the investigative methods present in those subjects I preferred. Still, I hadn’t an idea of what statistics I wanted to do, but I figured I’d have a normal school life after a hectic high school one.

Unfortunately, my curiosity drew me to check out other subjects, and so I started making a spreadsheet that listed my requirements for my Honors program, statistics degree, and sociology degree. After a meeting with my advisor, Tim Kalliomaa, he suggested I see Dr. Olga Korosteleva, the statistics advisor, and in that fateful email, she suggested two options: double major, and then public health or public policy. Being not too fond of healthcare, I chose the latter.

And promptly spiraled.

Nonetheless, not all of my tools were great. The spreadsheet was partially based on the degree planner in the catalog, but I found myself weary of the degree planner’s sluggishness and lack of flexibility. You couldn’t, for example, move around classes with a few quick clicks.

So I decided to make a better one.

The second incarnation of the sheet was more organized. It listed out all of my requirements in two columns, but now had a schedule area for me to plan it out.

The third incarnation saw me pivot to an economics degree, which arose from a sociology internship tabling cursorily mentioning economic impact. However, I focused on “could,” not “should”, and in trying to add a sociology minor, I was up against a strange limitation.

As it turns out, my advisor informed me that there’s a soft cap to how many units you can take for a degree: 144 units. After 120, the minimum to graduate, the school starts bugging you. At 144, you better have a good excuse – or at least, an excuse. I wasn’t about to start risking things. So what’s the answer? Start using obscure mechanics!

As it turns out, College Board’s chokehold over high school-college education isn’t limited to the AP exams: they have the College Level Examination Program, or CLEP for short. They’re usually multiple choice exams, with some being essays, that can be taken at just about any normal working time at various test centers. This program is so obscure that several universities don’t even accept CLEP credit, but LBSU does.

And CLEP credits aren’t Timely Graduation credits, just like AP credits. So, if I took lower-level classes via CLEP, I could clear out some Timely Graduation credits. Thus, I chose their microecon and biology exams, kicking out six units. For free –thanks Modern States!

However, the limit was still there. To make sure I had the exact classes I needed, I did some Googling and got a conditional formatting code. Given a hypothetical schedule box, the code would check it; if the box had a class, it’d black out the corresponding class in my catalog lists. Thus, I always knew if I had every class to complete a major/minor.

After discarding my sociology minor, I found a new, obscure minor that seemed neat: Interdisciplinary Public Policy (IPP), which has the issue of one of its classes not being taught recently. Around this time, my desire for an MPA had a thorough grip on me, but an old siren song started to sing in my ears.

Right, I wanted to write.

I stuffed myself in a few creative writing classes and remembered I wanted to write a novel, pref erably with professor support. That’s how I found ENGL 499, Directed Studies, and after some finagling, I found that I could fit in an economics and IPP minor along side some creative writing classes that I wanted, but I also had an alternative plan where I did just statistics and economics as a double major.

Around this time, my advisor mentioned that there was a way to get an economics degree with fewer units: Economic Math Theory. Intended for future economic grad students, I was using it to do a minor’s amount of units (about 18 units) for a whole major – which was a shame, as I wanted to do more in economics. In choosing it, I found out I could fit in my creative writing plan and IPP.

Unfortunately, to do ENGL 499, you need at least a creative writing minor. I found out that it wasn’t too many extra units from the rest of my creative writing plan. With some additional, but costly, summer courses, I also found that I could sneak in two years of 12-unit semesters, for potential internships.

All in all, this entire spreadsheet has helped me realize students’ limitations and academic policies in higher education and how to deal with them, such as through CLEP exams and community college credit. My excessive schedule watching and research also revealed two oddities in LBSU’s educational methods.

For example, at the time of this writing, several upper-division GE classes don’t actually list in the line below them their “GE AREA” when on the public class schedule, meaning that we don’t have an automated linkage between actual class credits and that specific line below them. It can be bypassed by searching by GE Requirement, but it’s still an issue if you search by subject.

This can be confusing, especially with recently-changed classes. ENGL 317, formerly Technical Writing, is required for statistics majors and was not a Writing Intensive course 2022-2023. However, it is now ENGL 317, Professional and Technical Writing, and it is Writing Intensive for Fall 23 and onwards. Had I not found this out, I could have blundered into learning about old people in our usual easy WI class, GERN 400, and taken a credit I would’ve gotten from an obligatory course.

There’s also tuition. Unless you’re from outside California (in which case you do pay a per-unit fee), you pay in two options during the main-line semester: one to six units and seven or more. 12? 15? 18? 21? 24? Doesn’t matter, you pay the same amount for seven or more. This is technically a disadvantage for working students since it means you’re working with less “efficient” semesters by paying more per unit. For example, a 12-unit semester pays about $291 per unit, whereas an 18-unit semester pays about $194 per unit.

Have a full-time job, but godly work ethic and a trash schedule selection? Could pull off the 15 units, but six of those units are in the Mon/Wed 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m. and 12:30-1:45 p.m. block when you’re working? Too bad! With enough bad luck, you might end up with an extra semester when a student without a job would have no problems, thus taking the same number of units but costing about $3,000 more since we pay by semesters, not by units.

With this in mind, I nervously strode into a professor’s office hours and asked if I could listen to their lecture. With the plan I have in mind, a failure completely destroys it, so why not reduce risk by previewing the content? You can’t say I’m freeloading – 15, 18, 21, I pay the same amount. If I’m not disruptive and the professor allows it, then it’s all good. So what does this all mean?

Local community colleges limit you to nine units per summer. Starting in the summer between ninth and tenth grades, that’s potentially 27 units coming into LBSU before the application even opens. With some careful aiming and planning, you can easily make a plan that can demolish the entire lower-division GE requirements. All 48 units while other teens are flirting.

But you can do more than just GEs, although it is slightly risky. Still, it’s annoying having to search through colleges to make sure the class is actually offered during summer. To solve that, a separate website, Quottly, has a class search that compiles articulated classes in one area.

A particularly productive student can even get an Associate’s around the time of their high school degree – a rate of about five units per semester, including summers, from freshman to senior year. A bit of effort via Open University for upper divisions, limited to 24 units towards a degree, and you could get a hypothetical teenager to walk in with some 94 units.

And probably burnout.