Pre-Term Planning Causes TF Shuffling

Data from the new pre-term planning tool has led College administrators to shuffle teaching fellows among some courses prior to the beginning of the term, but professors say the new tool has played little to no role in shaping their lesson plans.

Last November, undergraduates and first- and second-year students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences were required to declare the courses in which they planned to enroll this spring through a new online system called pre-term planning.

The process, which is non-binding, is designed to prevent hassles during the first few weeks of the term—such as moves to larger classrooms, a shortage of textbooks at the Coop, and inappropriate numbers of teaching fellows—that have commonly arisen when courses received dramatically more or less enrollees than anticipated.

The number of sections that spring courses are budgeted for is determined in June, but after examining pre-term planning numbers in December the Office of Undergraduate Education adjusted some of those plans this year.

Given the novelty of pre-term planning, the College acted “very conservatively” when changing the number of sections assigned for a course, according to Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Education Katherine Stanton, who is supervising pre-term planning.

While Stanton declined to specify which courses were flagged as unexpectedly large or small, English professor Louis Menand said that his General Education class United States and the World 23: “Art and Thought in the Cold War” was among those affected.

Last year, Menand’s course boasted 263 students. This year, 140 students indicated through pre-term planning that they had plans to enroll in the course.

Menand said that once the College noted the projected decrease in class size, the General Education office notified him that his class would have fewer sections—and therefore fewer graduate teaching fellows—than it had been originally assigned.

“That meant going to the English department [and] figuring out where to reassign people,” Menand said. “I’ve had people work for me before who probably won’t be able to work for me again.”

Stanton noted that in some instances, she granted additional sections to classes which appeared to attract higher-than-anticipated interest.

Menand said that it was beneficial to the teaching fellows who were booted from his course that they were informed of their new placements earlier than they would have been without pre-term planning. “It’s better to do it now than to do it in February,” he said.

Despite seeing the new system as a boon for administrators hoping to improve the sometimes messy process of rearranging teaching fellow positions during the first few weeks of the semester, several professors said they were not interested to know the number of students who indicated a plan to enroll in the courses they are teaching this semester.

Professor of Islamic Art Gülru Necipoglu-Kafadar, who is co-teaching a new General Education class this semester, said that he had received the number of students who expressed intent to take his class in an e-mail. “I just deleted it,” he said. “I didn’t bother to read it.... I’ll teach it the same way if five or one-hundred people are there.”

Menand anticipated that students will not be deterred by the fact that they named tentative course choices in November from choosing different classes before official study cards are due.

“Harvard students—are you kidding? If they can shop, they’ll shop,” he said.

—Staff writer Julie M. Zauzmer can be reached at jzauzmer@college.harvard.edu.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

CORRECTION: Dec. 5, 2012

An earlier version of this article misidentified the gender of Islamic art professor Gülru Necipoglu-Kafadar, who is in fact a woman.