Let’s Fix Lotteries

One of the last things a student wants to hear in an overcrowded lecture hall is the word “lottery.” Course lotteries create problems for students who are both confused about their schedules and desperate to get into a certain course—and often needlessly so. Fortunately, both of these kinks can be smoothed out by a few simple changes in College policy.

One of shopping period’s biggest nuisances is waiting until just hours before study cards are due to figure out your schedule. Unfortunately, this is a surprisingly common problem: Last Thursday night, many students—including the sixth of the College that lotteries for Moral Reasoning 22, “Justice,” who did not receive their results until 11:00 p.m. on Thursday night—still didn’t know their lottery status. Such late lotteries leave students who have been rejected from the course with an insufficient amount of time to scramble for a final course and trot around campus collecting signatures. Students should not be forced to make rash decisions as the clock ticks down.

According to the Harvard University Registrar’s Office, lotteries are currently the domain of individual professors, who have the freedom to inform their students of results at any time. To solve the problem of late lotteries, the College should mandate that all lotteries end by 5 p.m. on the Thursday before Study Card day, at least 24 hours before study cards are due. That would give students enough time to see their advisers, shop additional courses, and make informed decisions.

Another problem with lotteries is that there is no clear or uniform policy regarding students pursuing a secondary field. Although one can’t declare a secondary field until one has completed all of the requirements, many departments, such as English, History, and Visual and Environmental Studies (VES), mandate that students take limited enrollment classes to complete those very requirements. Although students can notify a department of their intent to do a secondary field, without an official status it is extremely difficult to get into these types of courses.

Concentrators get priority, but those pursuing a secondary field are in some cases treated no differently than those taking the course as an elective. Indeed, on the secondary fields Web site, VES says that “students wishing to pursue…a secondary field are welcome to apply to limited-enrollment classes but will not be given preferential access to them.”

We recognize that secondary fields are new—this is the first shopping period during which secondary fields were in place—so it might take some time to catch all of the glitches in the system. Nonetheless, to make certain secondary fields a viable option, students need to be able to be given precedence in course lotteries when limited-enrollment courses are required.

Of course, there is a possibility that students might declare a secondary field to game the system, using their status to get preference in a lottery and then dropping the secondary field after enrolling in the course. This is a valid concern, but one that will hopefully occur infrequently. The complicated process of filing for a secondary field should deter students from declaring a secondary field in which they are not actually interested.

Both of these flaws in the system may seem small, but their elimination will ease the stress of shopping period for many students, allowing them to focus on what really matters: the classes themselves. We hope the College makes these small adjustments in time for the next shopping period.