One of the more common complaints concerns students being cut from over-subscribed classes. Students are often notified very belatedly, if at all, of having been cut. In this event, there exists no recourse prior to actual registration for rectifying this reduced courseload. Occasionally, students find that they have been cut from two or more classes, thereby necessitating the scramble to find new classes during add-drop, which pre-registration is supposed to eliminate.
The greatest weakness of the system, as we see it, is the lack of a guarantee that no student is left without a full courseload for the upcoming semester. We suggest that pre-registration be modified to accommodate more than the standard four-course selection. If students are able to add two backup choices to their forms, that would ensure a fallback option even if one or two of those four first-choice courses were over-subscribed or cancelled.
The chief advantage of this modification is its simplicity. It does not affect students who have in the past experienced few problems with pre-registration, and provides a safety net for students who wish to try their luck with pre-registering for popular courses.Whether he/she would later want to make changes within that courseload is a matter of changing priorities; pre-registration should at its barest minimum accomplish its objective of registering students for the four classes they want.
Such a system will have to depend heavily on faculty support. Professors, once notified that their class(es) is over-subscribed, must make quick decisions on whom to cut. Many faculty members dally needlessly in making these ultimately formulaic decisions. Additionally, implementing this system will no doubt mean a significant increase in administrative paperwork, the maintenance of which by current Registrar staff would be difficult. It is in this aspect of the pre-registration and registration systems that we must see lasting and dramatic change: the introduction of online registration.
While online registration is by no means a novel concept, faculty opposition has in the past scuttled initiatives for change. Online registration will not only establish a workable administrative framework for including backup course choices, but also provide professors with a quick way to monitor interest in classes.
As the teething problems with the library catalogue demonstrate, putting a dynamic system on disk possesses its own challenges. Yet, while working towards a long-run solution like online registration, we can implement short-term fixes like a second pre-registration period expressly for students cut from classes, much like Williams' program. The possibilities for improvement continue to stare at us, but if the powers-that-be persist in trembling before rather than embracing them, the College can only go backwards.