How to cook better cookies despite a terrible oven? I am a college student living in a dorm for the first time. One of the luxuries I used to have at home was the ability to cook store-bought cookie dough cookies in my oven and have them come out tasty and goey.

While my dorm does have the luxury of an oven I do not think it is a very good one. Maybe it is just me but the cookies that come out of it arent goey or that enjoyable. They are pretty dry and sometimes need to be cooked for 0.5-1.5 minutes more than I would cook them at home.

How would you suggest I change my baking strategy so I can get better results from my oven? (Rack placement, dough shaping, temperature, time, etc)

I believe my oven is a very basic electric oven. I usually place the pan on the 3rd (out of 4) rack up.
As suggested by Catija, moscafj and Ecnerwal the first thing you want to do is get a oven thermometer to verify that the temperature you're setting is the one you're actually getting. If possible you might should to bring it back home to see how well your home oven is calibrated. It may be the case that your home oven is slightly off in one direction and your dorm in the other direction so you might need to make a bigger adjustment than just testing your dorm oven would indicate.

That said, it sounds like your problem is that you're leaving the cookies in the oven for too long. Chewy cookies are basically under cooked cookies, you want to take them out of the oven when they're golden brown on the outside while still soft in the middle. Differences in lighting and glass between your old stove and the new one might make it harder to judge when the cookies are done, causing them to appear less browned then they actually are. Also cookies will still cook a bit while cooling on the counter, hardening up, so you're aiming for cookies that are a bit less done than you want in the end.