With advising and registration in full swing, some issues have come to the forefront of many student’s minds.

The Student Government Association has received much student response and frustration concerning advising and evaluations.

There are two recurring issues that students face in advising:

One, overcrowding and two, a shift from faculty advisers to professional advisers.

More than half the freshmen going through orientation start their academic careers in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

During orientation for advisement, all students are divided into groups of around 15 to 20 students.

The advisers sit with each student for a few minutes, glimpse over their transcripts, and recommend classes for the student to take.

During this process, there is little time for the student to discuss different options for classes or other areas of interest due to the student-adviser ratio.

The advising is also not specific to each student’s major, whether pre-med, pre-business or pre-journalism.

This is an unfair process for advisers and students alike, and inefficiency results.

On a similar note, there has been a recent trend within departments across campus to start moving toward using more professional advisers than faculty advisers, a change with both advantages and disadvantages.

Full-time advisers don’t teach classes or conduct research, so they have more time to familiarize themselves with the class schedule, professors and graduation requirements.

Faculty advisers, however, are able to build lasting relationships with the students and often write students’ letters of recommendation for graduate schools or reference students to their contacts outside the realm of academia.

Given that the midpoint just passed, SGA also has been looking into the evaluations process.

Many departments have moved to an online evaluation at the end of each semester in lieu of paper evaluations completed in class.

In these departments, this change has decreased the student response rate dramatically, leaving some professors with a response rate as low as 25 percent.

Evaluations play a key role in tenure and promotion for professors and are also a helpful resource for students.

Midterm evaluations have also been a subject of discussion among students.

Many students would like to see the use of evaluations at the midpoint to allow constructive criticism and feedback about the course.

Although these would not be included in the tenure and promotion process, they would give faculty a sense of student response and allow students the option to recommend classroom changes.

SGA will be working with the senior administration to address some of these student concerns.

We would like all students to play an important role in helping with these improvements by giving us feedback about your experiences.

Please e-mail us at ugasga@uga.edu, go to our website www.uga.edu/sga or attend one of our weekly meetings in the Miller Learning Center to let us know how you think we can help improve advising and the evaluations process.

- Connor McCarthy is the president of the Student Government Association and Nicki Batelli is the vice president.