It's that time of year again: "shopping period." Although not as crowded as Black Friday, the two weeks of add-drop are some of the most hectic of each semester. Professors struggle to scare away prospective students in order to keep courses small, while students do the work for half-a-dozen classes or more in order to choose the four they really want to take. The courtship ritual of the shopping period is by nature awkward, but a healthy add-drop is essential to the health of the College's open curriculum, and there are a few changes that could drastically improve the first two weeks of every semester.

It is no secret that many faculty members dislike the shopping period, and it's hard to argue with their reasoning. Without a consistent class roster, the efficiency of the first two weeks of the semester is greatly diminished. In the case of a seminar course, this represents a significant portion of the semester. To effectively shorten the add-drop period, many professors close courses after the first week or assign enough reading or writing as to force students to either commit to the course or drop it.

Although we sympathize with the faculty's point of view, there are better solutions than forcing students to prematurely choose between classes. For example, students will be less likely to shop around if they are well informed about courses before they even walk in the door. Professors have the ability to place their courses' syllabi on Blackboard well in advance of the beginning of a semester, but few utilize this option. Furthermore, professors can now add their book lists to the course catalog, but even fewer professors used the new feature this fall. If students could read courses' syllabi over the summer, they would be less likely to waste time shopping classes they'll never take.

Of course no amount of information will ever fully curb shopping. As long as add-drop is part of registration, students will sit in on classes that they don't end up taking. Still, students don't have to be as transient as the current system requires them to be. The easiest solution would be to schedule fewer classes at the same time, but professors and students both like taking classes in the middle of the day. Yet with so many courses overlapping at popular times, students have no other option but to go to one class on Monday at 12:30, for example, and another at that time on Wednesday. The College could limit this issue by giving professors the option of staggering the first meeting times of each course. In many classes, the first day is devoted to simply distributing and reading the syllabus anyway, and if half of the classes during a given time slot met during the first half of the period and the other half met during the second half, students could more conveniently investigate a host of courses without missing any.

Add-drop can be inconvenient for the entire College community, but Amherst couldn't work without it. The open curriculum exists because the College believes we all benefit from being in only the courses we want, and it is shopping that makes that possible.