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How COUp Makes Its Schedule

How do you get a large group of anime fans, all with different tastes and genre preferences, to agree on what to watch for a semester? Well, you don’t, but this is the closest COUp gets.

The first step of the schedule creation process is suggestions. You can suggest an anime at any time by emailing a co-president or messaging one on Discord, but when a semester starts we’ll send out a dedicated submission form for it, including a deadline for when you can make a suggestion for the current semester. We have a decent number of rules and requirements on what you can and cannot suggest, which include:

Suggestions (which can be a TV anime, movie, or OVA) should not be any of the following:

  • Something a fourth-year senior could have seen in COUp. For example, in Fall 2019 and Spring 2020, anything COUp had watched from Fall 2016 and later were off limits, but in Fall 2020, shows we watched in Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 became eligible again. You can find our old schedules here to check if we’ve watched your suggestion recently.
  • A sequel, or anything that requires you to have seen another work in its series in order for it to make sense. This has one main exception– if we watched a show as a semester-long regular in a fall semester, we can vote to continue it in the following spring semester. (This has some leeway. We’ve watched JoJo parts out of order, for example. Just nothing that absolutely requires that you’ve seen something else.)
  • Porn. Just don’t.
  • Anything that is currently on U.S. television. This is for Student Union copyright reasons and basically just means anything currently airing on Toonami, since anything on a streaming service is fine.
  • Dubs. COUp has no official position on dubs vs. subs, but we are only allowed to show subbed anime for Student Union copyright reasons.
  • Anything particularly hard to find. We appreciate a wide range of shows, but it’s probably not a good idea to suggest something that hasn’t had a physical release since the 1980s or something similarly difficult. If you can bring a copy (digital or physical) yourself, feel free to suggest it!
  • Something you know next to nothing about and only suggested because you thought the title and MAL description looked cool. Yes, this happened. Yes, it was a disaster. A hilarious disaster, but we’d prefer not to have any unpleasant unexpected surprises.

With that in mind, even if your suggestions follow all of these rules, that is not a guarantee that all or any of them will end up on the ballot. We trim the ballot somewhat to keep the ballot meeting from going on for too long, since we watch a clip for everything on the ballot. However, these guidelines will increase the chances of your suggestion getting in:

  • Providing a (brief, like a sentence or two) description of the show and why you like it.
  • The show has a good stopping point or ends in 12-13 episodes (which is the maximum number of episodes of a show we watch per semester).

Once the submission period for a semester has closed, COUp leadership narrows down the suggestions to a ballot of 30 episodic anime series and an assortment of one-off movies and OVAs. This ballot is open to the entire club membership to vote on. Though we send it out online, we encourage you to attend our once-a-semester ballot meeting, where we’ll watch clips of each anime on the ballot and discuss each of them. We use a score voting system where voters rate each anime on the ballot with a number between one (least interested in watching) and five (most interested in watching).

Of the 30 episodic anime series, the top three become our semester-long regulars, which we watch 11-13 episodes of in the second half of every meeting. The fourth through twelfth highest-voted series become our rotational anime, which we watch three episodes each of in blocks of three shows in the first half of most meetings. The remaining slots are taken up by the top two or three (depending on the semester) movies or one-shot OVAs.

Ultimately, the schedule looks something like this:

7:00 – 8:15: Rotates from week to week (either three episodes of different anime, or a movie)
8:15 – 8:45: Break
8:45 – 10:00: One episode each of our three semester-long series