Shopping Period Reconsidered

Last Thursday I e-mailed my roommates to say it was safe to talk to me again. The fragile period of self-doubt, confusion, gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair, periodically interspersed with hours spent lying on the couch, my feet up, moaning, had ended: I had picked my classes.

It might be hard to convince you that I like this routine, but I do. From the day the course book arrives at my doorstep (or doesn't, in the case of this year, so I read it on the Web), I read it cover to cover, pen in hand, marking a complex pattern of courses and their relative rank in my mind. I create a database which I sort by semester, exam group, Core, concentration or elective credit, of literally hundreds of courses. I boil down to a final list that numbers in the teens and hit the ground running during shopping period, optimizing the perfect schedule--if often through a good amount of academic existential crisis.

For whatever reason, my own personal class circus was short-lived this year, and so I thought that the price I normally pay for my Olympic shopping--being hopelessly behind in reading by study-card day--could be avoided. Yet the courses I chose have not panned out that way at all; in fact, a number of the introductory lectures had chapters and articles assigned for them. No matter how early I knew my classes, the reading would still be there.

And often the books wouldn't. The Coop always make an effort to provide the correct number of books to students at the cheapest prices, but sometimes the system doesn't work. "It's an added expense for the store if we are not efficient on bringing in the correct number of books to the store," Jeremiah P. Murphy '73, the president of The Coop, told me. Murphy said the costs, which are "due to the uniqueness of the Harvard shopping period," are built into the margin on the book. That means when a course has a dramatically higher enrollment than one might have thought, books are scarce and when a course is "under-enrolled," the cost of shipping back the extra books figures into future book prices.

This is when shopping period sours. Professors want to start teaching courses and stop holding open houses. Students want and need to know what readings are expected and to be able to purchase them. The Coop wants to provide the correct number of books at the best cost to avoid the Internet competition and the angry, frustrated students in line worked up about the bitter end of shopping freedom and the need to commit.

Maybe the whole problem is the need to commit. And so I propose the following for renewed, serious consideration: non-binding course pre-registration. If Harvard is unwilling to join the realm of the logically-scheduled semester schools, it can at least do us this favor.

I can hear the bags zipping and the notebooks closing as you go to shop another article, but hear me out. At first glance, pre-registration seems the enemy of student choice, requiring some sense of preparedness unlikely to be held in advance. Yet in the end, for us it will be just another hoop to jump through like the plans of study many concentrators fill out and then dutifully ignore year to year. For the Faculty, it will be an important step toward more responsible course organization.

I was disappointed, but not surprised, to learn that my course catalog arrived at home in San Diego after the Houses opened for students, and I was already here. My roommates and I joked over the summer that course catalogs arrive at the last possible moment and might, at this rate, arrive at add-drop deadline. No real worries though; I simply took advantage of the Handbook clause (p. 392): "One additional copy of the catalog is available free-of-charge to students who come in person to the Registrar's Office."

The latest-possible-moment arrival of the course catalog is caused in part by an inability of the Faculty to commit and commit early enough to their courses for the following year. By not even providing the titles early enough, students have no idea what classes actually will be offered in the fall. I was pleased to see that the Web course catalog I dutifully downloaded in August had Web links for every course--though, despite the cheery "syllabus" icon on the second page, the overwhelming majority led nowhere. In my experience professors sometimes don't even have a syllabus completed by the first day of class.

Handing out the syllabus is essentially the only duty of the first day. Putting the syllabus on the Web could help students and professors alike by helping move true teaching one day closer to the beginning of the term and by helping students know what a course is really going to cover in contrast to what a sexy paragraph might make them think. Currently, the helpful but at times outdated or incomplete list of books in the CUE Guide is the only hint to what books will be read.

The Coop, to its credit, has already pressed the Faculty for more information and has seen results in predicting the correct number of books to order. "It's been getting better," Murphy said. "The more communication we have with the Faculty and more we know of the history of their enrollment, the better off we are."

The most dramatic, if far-fetched, changes could come in how and why students pick courses. If students could see the syllabi ahead of time, they might actively contact the professors and find out how a course will work. Without the need to commit the next day or face a fine, students and professors alike might be more open to questioning choices of emphasis and asking what is feasible or of interest. They could e-mail professors or go to their office hours far ahead of a seminar or conference course and find out if the class will be a match. Perhaps most importantly, they could prepare readings for courses they were sure to take, lessening the overall bulge of work that begins the semester.

Pre-registration, then, will help all involved: students will have seen the courses and hopefully the syllabi before shopping week, The Coop will have more accurately gauged course enrollments, and professors--after committing earlier to what courses they will offer--will reap benefits in a less undecided audience during shopping week.

Then I'll need to find another excuse for why I am behind in the reading.

Adam I. Arenson '01 is a history and literature concentrator in Lowell House. His column will appear on alternate Thursdays.