Where Did Your Critical Review Surveys Go?
We all know the feeling: Daylight Savings Time has robbed you of an hour of winter sunlight, your alarm is set for Pre-Registration at 8:00 A.M. tomorrow, and you’re in the basement of the SciLi furiously shopping courses that all seem to be capped at increasingly low numbers. You finally find a course that seems sort of cool. Plus, there’s a decent chance you get in. Doing a little dance, you click on the link to the Critical Review.Nothing.It’s at this point that people move on and just decide whether or not to take the course. Rarely, if ever, have people stopped to ask the all-important question:Where did all those Critical Review surveys go? Luckily, I did some research and found some plausible theories. Theory 1Your Critical Review surveys, diligently filled out and carefully worded, were loaded onto a speedboat at a private marina in Newport, all ready to be shipped off to the secret location where the data for these things gets compiled. The boat was scheduled to leave under cover of darkness last spring, but, in a tragic turn of fortune, an inattentive dock worker left the boat unmoored and it drifted off to sea. It has not yet been found but is suspected to be floating somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. A possible sighting was reported in international waters last week, but retrieval seems unlikely.Your options:Find the boat? Find the dockworker? Talk to someone who took the class? 
Maybe this one will be different?
Theory 2Your Critical Review surveys (diligently filled out, don’t forget) were packaged carefully, bubble-wrapped, and sent via police escort to the FedEx plane intended to transport them to the secret location where they would have been amassed and uploaded online. Sadly, on the way, the police were called off for another, more important VIP, and the surveys were robbed from the back of the convoy by various parties interested in such valuable information as whether the professor was funny or whether there were too many dad jokes told at the beginning of class.Your options:Find the robbers and make them tell you what was in those surveys. Was the professor a little slow to grade things? Did people spend more than the requisite 180 course hours per semester?! Was this course possibly *gasp* A LITTLE HEAVY ON READING?!?! 
Reason #1 to read the Critical Review: scintillating prose.
Theory 3Your Critical Review surveys were to be transported through a system of secret tunnels under the City of Providence. Several operatives were dispatched to make sure the surveys made it, but the operatives missed (somehow) an entire sting operation in which trapdoors in the tunnels opened and the surveys (and their carriers) fell through. An inside job on the part of the operatives is suspected. The carriers of the surveys were unharmed but amnesic upon being found.Your Options:Not many, honestly. Maybe shop this one? But, seriously, good luck out there in registration, everyone. 
Only in CS, I guess.
Images via Paul Michaud '22 from thecriticalreview.org.