Editorial: Fairer course registration

Last week, many juniors and seniors arose before 7:30 a.m. to make the perennial mad rush to sign up for classes. It is understandable that the online system opens so early to give students an equal opportunity to enroll in courses when there are no other activities or classes scheduled and to reward those students who are committed enough to their courses to rise early. But for high-demand, competitive classes, the “early bird gets the worm” mantra does not apply. A mad rush at 7:30 a.m. to enroll in these courses does not favor the dedicated students per se. Instead, those who can avoid technical troubles with SCORE are those who fill such classes. Factors like typing a password quickly, the speed of an internet connection, the possibility of getting error messages or browser cache complications make the process patently unfair: These problems are unavoidable. In this case, all the birds are early, but few get the worm.

To be clear, the Board has no objection to courses that reserve spots for majors, for different class years or which require an application process. Given that all students at one time will be seniors and have first choice for courses, we do not object to the ordering of enrollment times either. Indeed, there are good reasons to do each of these things. Every freshman who is blocked from taking upper-level courses or who cannot get into a filled class will one day be a senior with access to these types of courses. To base the outcomes of enrollment on factors such as server crashes or cache problems at 7:31 a.m., however, is unfair. If a professor has chosen to make a class open to enrollment by all students in a certain group, all should have an equal chance to take the course.

A better system would allow everyone who logged into SCORE and selected classes on the first day of course enrollment to then be entered in a random lottery for classes that were oversubscribed. There would be no reason for a mad dash at 7:30 a.m. to secure a seat in a competitive class. Students would then receive notification about the courses they were successfully enrolled in the next day. Students who were not selected for competitive courses could sign up for other classes when normal course registration continued the next day. Implementing this system would require OIT to retool SCORE to do this sorting. This retooling might include initial technical outlay to design and test the system in addition to creating some method of assigning second-choice classes for time slots. Despite this increased effort, reducing traffic on the system and accompanying SCORE complications could reduce stress for OIT on the morning of enrollment. A new system would lead to more sleep and less stress for all parties involved and would ensure more fair and equitable outcomes for course enrollment.