Elective curriculums require undergraduates to choose from a large roster of courses for enrollment each term. It has proven difficult to characterize this fateful choice process because it remains largely unobserved. Using digital trace data to observe this process at scale at a private research university, together with qualitative student interviews, we provide a novel empirical study of course consideration as an important component of course selection. Clickstream logs from a course exploration platform used by most undergraduates at the case university reveal that students consider on average nine courses for enrollment for their first fall term (<2% of available courses) and these courses predict which academic major students declare two years later. Twenty-nine interviews confirm that students experience consideration as complex and reveal variation in consideration strategies that may influence how consideration unfolds. Consideration presents a promising site for intervention in problems of equity, career funneling, and college completion.

选修课程要求本科生从大量课程表中进行选择，以便每个学期入学。事实证明，很难确定这种决定性的选择过程的特征，因为它仍然很大程度上未被观察到。使用数字跟踪数据在私立研究型大学中大规模观察此过程，以及定性的学生访谈，我们提供了关于课程考虑的重要实证研究，作为课程选择的重要组成部分。案例大学的大多数本科生使用的课程探索平台上的Clickstream日志显示，学生平均考虑在他们的第一个秋季学期入学的课程有9门（少于可用课程的2％），这些课程可以预测两年后哪些专业的学生会宣布入学。二十九次面试证实，学生体验到的思考复杂，并揭示了思考策略的变化，这可能会影响思考的发展方式。考虑因素为干预平等，职业发展和大学结业提供了一个有希望的场所。