Most Yalies have had this experience: they sign up for a class that has good reviews, friends have recommended, and looks like will be a breeze… Likewise, they breeze through preliminary assignments with the help of fellow students straight past the deadline for dropping the course. Everything seems fine until a midterm paper or test, when it becomes strikingly clear that the class they signed up for was not the easy-breezy-beautiful gut they were hoping for. We want to make sure this never happens again so we polled the campus and got these results. Read this before you turn in your schedules and be warned.

Quantitative Reasoning

What you should take: Math in the Real World. It’s capped at 25, so you may be out of luck this semester, but everyone said it’s “definitely a gut”.  If you don’t get in, try Galaxies and the Universe (if you have a friend to do it with you) or Geometry of Nature (which will hopefully be coming back next year).

What you shouldn’t take: Tech World and Fractal Geometry. It looks like both have gone the way of the storied “Vikings,” and one person who took Tech World said, “Tech World is the kind of class that’s so easy you kind of forget you’re taking it. This does not end well.”

What the people said: “Pleasure’s of Counting is definitely not a gut. It will eat your life.”

“Statistics as a Way of Knowing must be on this list…”

Science

What you should take: History of Life, or Movie Physics (try and store up extra karma, getting in to this one is nearly impossible).

What you shouldn’t take: Ornithology (which is the study of birds, by the way).

What the people said: “Science in Novels or something…it was basically reading science-based fiction…and then the inner chemist erupted out of our professor and then the class turned into a straight up science class, ignoring the reading for the most part, in favor of problem sets…you get to do a creative final project!” (Is this for or against? We can’t tell.)

“current issues in biological science”

“Biological Anthropology”

Language

What you should take: Preferably a language you already know if you really want the easy way out of this, but if you want an easy language starting from the ground up, it looks like either Indonesian, Czech, or Polish are pretty equivalent.

What you shouldn’t take: One person said, “JAPANESE IS NOT A GUT AT ALL EVER.” Just in case you were wondering.

What the people said: “Early level Spanish classes are ridiculously easy A’s. Freshmen and sophomores could do well to bolster their GPAs a bit, with as early as L3 Spanish. Plus you always meet an interesting cross section of Yalies, and lot of attractive people.”

Easy A’s, for no particular credit

What you should take: Women, Food, and Culture, Intro to American Politics, Dilemmas of the Nuclear Age, or The Black Atlantic Visual Tradition if Master T. comes back. It’s a seriously great class and there’s lots of dancing.

What you shouldn’t take: Psychology, Biology, and Politics of Food. Watch Sandra Lee instead.

What the people said: “Jews in Muslim Lands has about as much work as your average history lecture, although not having section is nice, and the grading is pretty friendly. But read 2009 evals from when it first got tagged as a gut and then turned out to be an actual class–pretty hilarious. Also, Intro Linguistics–easiest class I’ve taken at Yale. One half hour problem set a week, no reading or studying required if you go to lecture.”

“Language, Culture, and Identity. Its 3 3 page papers about whatever you want, 1 5 page paper about whatever you want, lecture and section are optional, and the readings don’t relate to the papers so you basically only have to write 14 pages over the whole semester, thats all, to get an A.”

“I don’t think Black Atlantic is being offered this semester. If so, it’s gut status relies SOLELY on the fact that it was traditionally taught by T, the OG BAMF. Ashe.”

Want to check out more great classes this semester? Read the Bullblog No-Bull Guide to the Bluebook.