How to Use CourseFinder

Well, that's more of a rhetorical question, but let's see what we can do.
Have you made sure that...

• Everything is spelled right?
• You've tried searching with and without quotation marks around your search?
• You're not using the minus sign to eliminate too many results?
• Your search is not too specific (for instance, there may be no night classes offered in Stevenson hall in the ITK department) ?

If you've double checked your search terms and you're still not getting any results, and you're pretty sure you should be, drop us a line at iwss2@IllinoisState.edu. Let us know exactly what you're searching for, and what you expected to find.

Q, R, S and T letter codes are used to classify the different course sections based on the eligibility requirements for course registration.

Q = Only new first semester Freshmen permitted to enroll.

R = Only students with earned hours plus enrolled hours less than 24 permitted to enroll.

S = Only students with earned hours plus enrolled hours equal to or greater than 24 permitted to enroll.

T = General Education students with any hours permitted to enroll.

When searching by course, you're not only going to get results based on the title of the course, but also based on what the prerequisites are for a given course.

For example, searching for English 100 will not only give you English 100 as a result, but also courses like English 395, 286, and 285 because they have English 100 as a prerequisite.

If you still think you've done a search and the results aren't at all what you expect, you can send a note to iwss2@IllinoisState.edu with your search terms, what results you got, and what results you expected.

• You can search by using key words as you would any other search engine.
• You can search by Course Number, such as ITK 168, ENG 101
• You can search by Course Title, such as Fundamental Concepts in Biology
• You can search by Department such as ENG, KNR
• You can search by time of the day, such as Morning, 10:00 AM
• You can search by days of the week, such as M, Monday, Mon
• You can search by Professor
• You can search by Building, such as Stevenson
• You can search by Gen Ed, such as Inner Core : Natural Sciences
• You can search by IAI, such as IAI : S5
• You can search by Online or Internet Courses

The new searchable Course Registration Directory is powered by a Google search. Illinois State University actually owns a Google search box, which means more up-to-date and relevant results, as well as a faster-loading results page.

By using the minus sign (-) you can literally subtract results from your search! So if you wanted to see all the classes taught by Dr. Smith that aren't English 145, you could type Smith -145 into your search box.

You should know there shouldn't be a space between the minus sign and what you want to exclude. Smith - 145 is very different from Smith -145.

Plenty! By default, Google will include the "and" operator in your search (if you're not using quotation marks around your phrase).

So technically when you type in: Smith Stevenson night , Google searches for Smith and for Stevenson and for night.

The "or" operator works a little differently. By specifying that you'd like to search for ENG110 OR MAT120, your results will include only two classes, English 110 and Math 120.

You can use "or" to limit your results to English classes in Stevenson OR Schroeder, but no where else. Or you could use it to see all of the classes taught by two or three specific faculty members.

By putting quotation marks around what you type in the search box, you search for an exact phrase match. This means that if you search for "Dr. Bob Smith" you may not get results to come up that list him as Dr. Robert Smith (or if Mr. Smith has yet to finish his Ph.D.).

Quotation marks can be a good way to help you get more specific results, but you also run a greater risk of searching with too narrow a focus.