The Case for Preregistration

Very understandably, many students at Harvard College have trepidations about the notion of preregistration for classes—to which, as The Crimson has reported, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) William C. Kirby is giving serious consideration. The institution of shopping week is certainly a boon to the quality of undergraduate academic life, and any threat to the flexibility associated with shopping week is sure to be appraised with a suspicious eye. Thus, as both a tutor in the House system and a graduate student in a department (sociology) in which grad students have long advocated the sort of reforms Dean Kirby is considering, I write to present to The Crimson’s undergraduate readership the graduate students’ case for preregistration—and why it would ultimately enhance rather than diminish the quality of undergraduate education.

The CUE Guide commonly features complaints about teaching fellows who are less knowledgeable about courses’ subject matter than might be hoped, more apathetic about the quality of their instruction than might be hoped or both. Certainly there is no single magic bullet capable of putting these issues once and for all to rest, but both problems are significantly exacerbated by the current FAS registration system. Because course enrollments remain largely uncertain until study cards have actually been filed, course heads and potential teaching fellows are left to coordinate staffing on the basis of guesses and probabilities. As both sides seek throughout the process to reduce their uncertainty, matches are often made that are less than ideal for all parties involved.

For example, say I am a graduate student in U.S. geography, with a particular academic interest in New Hampshire. My department teaches a popular lecture course on New Hampshire, but because the course head is new to the Faculty this year, prior years’ enrollments in the course provide only a ballpark guess as to what this year’s enrollment will be. The head of the New Hampshire course offers a teaching appointment to me—pending enrollment. I may have the opportunity to teach one, two or three sections of that course—or none at all. We won’t know until a week into the semester, when final enrollment numbers are in.

Meanwhile, another course is being offered on Idaho. I have relatively little knowledge about and no particular interest in Idaho—but the head of that course can guarantee two sections’ worth of teaching for me, if I choose to commit to the course immediately. If not, she will move on to other interested graduate students. Why would this professor hire a grad student with little interest in a state famous for potatoes? Because in this market, she’s happy to have anyone who can offer a firm commitment as opposed to a conditional offer (“Well, if the New Hampshire gig doesn’t come through…”).

So the choices before me are either to commit to a course I have little interest in, or to surrender my guaranteed teaching slot there in favor of a possible position with the course I’m truly interested in. Unless I’m independently wealthy, it’s clear that there’s great pressure upon me to go with the former option rather than the latter—come Oct. 1, my Somerville slumlord looking for the rent was not going to be interested in a sob story about how kids today just don’t give a darn about New Hampshire. Live free or die, indeed.

In this example, I’m fortunate even to have a firm offer at all. Too often, grad students are left juggling various competing conditional offers, attending multiple lectures during shopping week and not knowing if they’ll be teaching for one, another or none of the courses. This is a nightmarish situation both for grad students and faculty, and its implications for the quality of undergraduate education are clear. A non-binding preregistration period would of course not eliminate the enrollment uncertainty associated with shopping period, but the uncertainty would be substantially reduced. As a result, course staff rosters would typically be fixed much earlier and courses would (theoretically, at least) be better-planned—while undergraduates would retain all the course-switching privileges they currently possess. Many other universities use this system—and, in not a few cases, actually allow their students a longer period of penalty-free course switching than does Harvard. To improve satisfaction for all parties—students, faculty and teaching fellows—in Harvard’s lecture courses, Dean Kirby is on the right track.

Jay Gabler is a graduate student in

sociology and a resident tutor in Pforzheimer House.