As I try to pick courses for the fifth time at Amherst, these are definitely not the first concerns that come to mind. In fact, there are several smaller problems with much simpler solutions that would undoubtedly paint a friendlier face on pre-registration and provide registration with greater ease to any liberal arts student.
Improvement #1: Include in every pre-registration packet a sabbatical schedule for every professor on campus. All of us realize that professors are occasionally on leave; many of us, though, don't realize that there is a fixed schedule that determines (nearly always) when professors will or will not be teaching. On a campus with only 160 full-time professors, we know that specialties-and therefore course offerings-are often unique to professors. Would it not make sense to inform students in advance when a professor will be away (i.e. a course will not be offered)? This would allow students to better plan their time at Amherst by allowing them to best schedule classes which really interest them.
Improvement #2: Similar to the sabbatical schedule, the registrar should create a multi-year class offering schedule. In a recent phone conversation with a friend at the College of the Holy Cross, I was not surprised to learn that registration there is similar to registration here. However, the students there have an advantage when picking classes: in addition to the year-long schedule of classes, they are told when classes will be offered again during the next three years. Much like a sabbatical schedule, this helps students pick classes.
At Amherst, we can easily see that Math 11 is offered every semester. However, the patterns are not so clear when you begin looking at upper level social science seminars, for example. The handbook will tell us if it's a fall or spring course, but it will not tell us if it was offered once by a visiting professor and will not be offered again during our four years here. Clearly, this would require a little more work than the sabbatical schedule, but if both were done at the same time, a long-term course calendar might not be such a difficult task. In fact, professors generally know what courses they will be offering over the course of at least two years. Couldn't we get this down on paper somehow?
Improvement #3: In the spirit of embracing diversity at Amherst, let's begin offering a diversity of class times. As a social science major, I am constantly torn between choosing among classes that conflict with each other-and I'm sure that many students across all departments share my frustration. When going over the class meeting time schedule, I look up and down the columns and see that an overwhelming majority of classes are taught at 2:00 p.m. Sure, 2:00 is a great time to take a class, and I'm sure it's a great time to teach one, too. But isn't it just a little insane for a department to offer more than half of its courses during the semester at the same time of day?
We're a small college! Our course offerings in any given semester are limited! Is it fair to students, especially majors, to schedule so many courses in one department at the same time? I don't think so. Now, I'm certainly not advocating increasing the number of 8:30 and 9 a.m. classes (although I've definitely taken my share of them and will continue to), but let's get real: you can take a maximum of two classes a semester at 2 p.m., and every semester so far at Amherst, that's what I've done. I'm also sure that classes would draw similar crowds at radical times like 12:30 p.m., or even (gasp!) 11:00 a.m. Students would be given many more options when picking classes, and professors may even get larger turnouts.
There are plenty of other problems with registration, but these are simple issues that can be addressed without much of the bureaucracy that will probably be needed to fix most of the issues addressed in the SGO's letter. Let's take a few small steps in the right direction before pre-registering for Spring 2002.