But how does the master schedule, a schedule that can be both a blessing and a curse to students, get created? The process is not as complex as it may seem.
Associate Dean of Faculty and Acting Registrar Rick Griffiths explained that the process of choosing time slots for classes rests primarily with the individual departments. Each department organizes its own schedule of classes and sends it to the Registrar’s Office, leaving the administration with very little authority to dictate class times. “In places with somewhat larger top-down administrations, departments must use all of the available time slots before using the same time slot again,” said Griffiths. Griffiths mentioned that Williams College has such a system in place. “But that would be a drastic move at the College and would lead to tough discussions within departments of who gets the short straw, the 8:30 slot in the morning,” Griffiths explained.
The Registrar can signal which time slots are being filled up, but then departments simply move classes to the next most popular spot and those spots quickly become crowded as well. The Office of Institutional Research and Planning for faculty and administrators releases statistics on course scheduling distributions but, according to Griffiths, the allotment of classes throughout the week has not changed much over the past few years.
One reason for the smaller percentage of morning class or Friday classes is student willingness to take such classes. “Students don’t want to take classes before 10 o’clock or even 11 o’clock or on Fridays,” mentioned Griffiths. “Faculty would be happier to teach earlier in the day, to teach Friday, but there isn’t much incentive to do that if students are not going to be up and able to talk. And if students aren’t going to want to take the course for that reason, that’s a disincentive.”
An important consequence of the College’s distribution of courses is its need to have a large number of smaller classrooms in stock. “Because we need 30 seminar-sized rooms for First-Year Seminars [that all meet at the same time], if you add another 20 or 30 seminar-sized classes at the same time, you don’t have enough rooms of that size,” explained Griffiths. “The College has to maintain more classrooms than it would under a more efficient system. Those spaces can’t be reading rooms and lounges because you have to try to accommodate your maximum time flow. In this way Amherst classrooms are used relatively less than their peer institutions, which is inefficient.”
In most departments, professors simply choose which time slots they want to have their classes, and the department chair works out the final schedule. Chair of Political Science Professor Thomas Dumm and Chair of History Professor Martha Sandweiss said that their departments try to spread out class offerings across all time slots as much as possible so as to minimize possible conflicts. Although most departments do not coordinate with each other, Chair of Chemistry Professor Joseph Kushick explained that the physics, chemistry, biology and math departments have a alternating system of time slots for the premed classes such that they are never given at the exact same time.
Scheduling science classes, explained Kushick, is particularly difficult because they include extended lab periods. The chemistry classes are generally three-hour lectures a week with an afternoon discussion period and lab. This seven hours of class time per week places constraint on when the courses can be offered, especially because of the lab period. “We need support staff on site when labs are in session so it’s not possible to schedule labs at odd times,” said Kushick. “[The labs] must be during the standard working day.”
While some conflicts are inevitable, at the College they could stem from the fact that departments tend not to coordinate with each other. “Departments all organize their class schedules at the same time, so it is probably hard to know what the conflicts for students would be, that there would be two courses large numbers of students would need to take at the exact same moment,” explained Griffiths. Some conflicts arise because, being a small school, the College offers some introductory classes only once a year and does not offer multiple sections throughout the day.