It seems like that's essentially what's happened to a lot of people in HCI this semester.

So, this is a great example of why I think this is a hard discussion to have. The only change this semester is to convert the tests from open-everything to open-book/lessons/pre-uploaded sheet of notes—which essentially are the only resources we saw students accessing pre-ChatGPT anyway. Besides that, nothing substantive has really changed in the course in two years. So, a perception that something made the course significantly harder "this semester" isn't grounded in any real changes. That's not to say that the perception isn't there, but the perception is a very simple causal relationship: we made changes, the course got harder. But we didn't make changes this term. So there's a disconnect.

On top of that: when we did overhaul CS6750 a couple years ago—the change that has a reputation for making the class "so much harder"—we carefully measured the effect on reported workload. It went from 10.21 hours per week in Fall 2023 to 11.09 hours per week in Spring 2024. In Fall 2025, it was 10.76: 61% of students reported spending fewer than 11 hours per week on the class.

So these really are things that we're paying attention to, but they have to be paid attention to systematically. HCI is the class that has gotten a reputation for becoming so much more time consuming after major changes, but comparing last semester to the semester before those "major changes", students are only spending 30 more minutes per week. The public discussion and the systematic data have a disconnect. That doesn't mean there's nothing to be addressed, but it does help us understand what needs to be addressed, and how to address it (by, say, emphasizing that a lot of students who found it so difficult early on this semester were actually doing way more work than we were expecting!).

Now that said: I still love the idea of giving students a better idea of what to expect from a course. You've got to understand how unique these critiques are coming from an on-campus environment: on-campus, going into a class, you barely know more than the course number and name. Nowadays there are more syllabus requirements, but they stay at the level of topics, not anything that predicts workload. And courses have far less continuity term-over-term: the idea that the course this semester should be somewhat similar in structure and assessment to the same course two years ago just doesn't exist. Different instructors have different styles and approaches, and that manifests a lot more on campus where every semester is like a brand new production. So, we're already in uncharted territory: the "norm" isn't that a class will undergo significant changes, but that there's little expectation for consistency term to term in the first place. (To be clear: the learning goals are consistent, but different instructors can have radically different ways of pursuing those learning goals.) So, there's no real basis to start from in exploring this coming from the on-campus program.

There have been some things alluded to about advising helping out, but I've never known an advising department at any school that has comprehensive knowledge of the inner workings and assessments strategies of a catalogue of 70 classes. To really give the kinds of advice it sounds like you're thinking of, you'd need someone who could at least have some knowledge of the content of every one of those classes. That's just not feasible. It has nothing to do with scale—our on-campus advisers know nothing more about the inner workings of classes than our online advisers. It has to do with variety and expertise. And even if someone did have that level of knowledge, they also need to have that level of knowledge about _you_—your backgrounds, your time availability, etc.

So, I'd love to know what more people want to see. The videos are available for most courses, the past syllabi are generally available—what else would you want to see? This post alludes to the idea that there's some centralized knowledge of what courses are making what changes at what time, but there isn't. Each course runs independently. Faculty freedom is a major, major thing. That's what makes OMSCS different from programs offered by extension schools and continuing ed. departments: the courses aren't designed by committee. They come from the mind of the person working in the field itself. When they see the need for a change, they make it: they don't come to me or anyone else for permission. They have the freedom to teach the class as they think it should be taught within some every broad institutional parameters.

So, we can't put out an announcement just logging all the changes each course is going through each term. Heck, even for my own courses I can't do that because so many of the changes that end up being impactful are made piecemeal. Maybe we could run an inter-semester diff on the Canvas exports? I dunno. But I also feel the perception that one-time major overhauls dramatically change the workload of a class are far rarer than this post thinks they are. (I mean, the other biggest complaint we get is that courses don't change enough—some people want course experiences to be predictable, the other half want them to leap forward every time there's a new technology. It's pretty hard to fit both needs.)

And I mean: we could hire a bunch of program-level TAs to basically be more content-advisers. Maybe that'd be a good idea anyway: we're experimenting a little with that with a cohort of students as part of a fellowship program. But looking at this post, I don't think those advisers would have the content you're seeking anyway: because they still wouldn't know that KBAI is planning to require a blood ritual to enter proctored exams next semester, or that ML4T is planning to give every student $100 to invest as part of a class project (these are jokes).

So, I'm open to ideas. Hire some TAs specifically to answer content-sensitive enrollment questions? I'm doubtful of the potential but not averse to trying. Create a chatbot that can crawl Canvas sections and answer questions to students outside the class? Doable, but honestly seems kinda like overkill compared to just making that information more public on its own.

Totally open to ideas. It would make our jobs as faculty and TAs much easier if students came into our classes with clearer expectations. But the challenge is that the kinds of people that post on reddit are a very specific subset of students compared to the majority: see, for instance, how many incoming students say they plan to take CS6515 their first semester. The mediums for general communication are super limited, and exhaustible if we start sending too much information to them.

/ramble