Word: classing
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...announcement passed fairly quietly a few weeks ago: Next spring, students will be asked to pre-register for courses months before classes begin. Their selections will remain non-binding, but they will give the College a clearer sense of who will take what class going into shopping week...
Nworah B. Ayogu ’10, the Class of 2010’s first marshal, was accepted to several top-ranked medical schools and is currently deciding which one to attend. He said that the U.S. News rankings played a role in where he decided to apply, but he also relied on his personal experience and professors’ advice...
...today, shopping is incredibly inefficient. The registrar seems to have a knack for wrongly guessing a given class’s enrollment, leading to a complex room reshuffle during the first week. In addition, many classes must scramble to find extra Teaching Fellows, a slow process that can delay sectioning and the syllabus. These TFs are also frequently underqualified, drawn from a subdiscipline barely relevant to the class. The current pre-registration plan hopes to cut down on this initial chaos—which cost Harvard one million dollars last year—but eliminating shopping would end it definitively...
...registration would also eliminate the need for the lotteries that constantly shatter students’ plans the day before study cards are due. Under pre-registration, gone would be the pressure of unearthing a fourth class at the 11th hour. Personally, I find this the most compelling argument against shopping: For me, the most stressful week of the year isn’t reading period, and it’s not exam period; it’s shopping period. In course selection as in life, ignorance of what’s ahead is far scarier than even the most dreaded...
...these costs, shopping period doesn’t even return a benefit—only a perceived one. If the claim is that pre-registration will result in more dissatisfaction with classes, we should remember that shopping is imperfect as well: Very few students can say that they have liked every single class they have taken at Harvard. Pre-registering would not lead to a rash of unhappiness any more than it has at the thousands of other schools with no shopping week—many of which are notoriously happier than...