After years of using Naviance for course selection, students of Bronx Science are now using TALOS. TALOS was developed by Rodda John, who graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 2017. It was originally implemented in Stuyvesant High School for AP course selections, but was soon relaunched for elective course selections as well. Now TALOS  has also been launched in Bronx Science.

While Naviance no longer offers course selection, students will continue to use it for finalizing their college lists and for requesting teacher recommendations. Some students are glad the course selection process has a different website from that of the college process. “It was very easy to find college information on Naviance. It was so easy that I would start stressing about the entire process. Now that there are two different websites, I will not have constant exposure to the college process, and I can stop looking at the scattergrams on Naviance,” said Luke Jin ’21.

Now TALOS  has also been launched in Bronx Science.

Like Naviance, TALOS also experiences bugs that cause it to crash randomly. However, this should not deter students from using it because the site is relatively new and experiences technical difficulties due to  the heavy volume of students using it at the same time. “Naviance would also crash periodically, so I’m not surprised TALOS crashed on the first day for many users,” said Asef Khan ’20. Another common problem was that many students did not see courses they qualified for on the drop down menus. These students had to appeal for these courses to have them pop up in their drop down menus.

Unlike Naviance, TALOS offers easier interface and a lot of processes are made simpler. For example, students will no longer have to ask their guidance counselors for access to their transcripts. They can simply request their transcripts via TALOS. Although seniors have no use for TALOS since they are not participating in the course selection process, they can also log in to TALOS to check their transcript average. Their username is their email and the password is their nine digit OSIS number. This feature is useful for seniors applying for summer jobs or summer courses as these programs require an accurate GPA. All students can also track their graduation status. This link leads to a chart with the graduation requirements and the rows and columns are color coded based on each student’s status.

Additionally, it’s easier to appeal for classes because the website features a button. This is also more environmentally friendly since students will no longer have to print out appeal forms and hand them to the departments. “This feature will save a lot of time because I won’t have to run around to talk to various Assistant Principals of departments,” said Devin Lobosco ’20.

TALOS also provides its users a list of pre-approved classes, so students can see which classes they qualify for and which classes they do not. This is easier than Naviance because Naviance did not have a list of pre-approved courses; instead, students had to go to each drop down menu and see the courses in  their drop down menu.

Despite these differences, the two sites are both easy to use and students should not have any difficulties with the course selection process.