The most important aspect of any college student's education is his or her course schedule. The size of courses, the quality of professors and the degree of coursework difficulty have the power to make or break a semester. Perhaps even more important, then, to the lives of Princetonians than the omnipresent Facebook.com is the Student Course Online Registration Engine (SCORE) — the website students use to register for courses. Like any website, SCORE is bound to have the occasional glitch. But SCORE's biggest shortcoming is the needlessly limited period of time during which students are permitted to access it.
The decision to prevent students from using SCORE during the summer months best illustrates the problems that SCORE's short window of access creates. Every year upperclassmen are forced to wait for the first day of school to start before they are permitted to modify their course schedules. As a result, some students find themselves locked out of classes that are filled to capacity even as other students are listed on the roster for limited-enrollment lectures and seminars that they plan to drop as soon as they got the chance. Others are forced to sit on their hands as courses that they signed up for in the fall are rescheduled to times that conflict with other courses and activities.
When SCORE is up and running, schedule-modification is easy enough. With a few clicks of a mouse, a student can add or drop a course even while maintaining an instant messaging conversation in the background. And as long as academic advisers are kept abreast of distribution and concentration requirements, students should be encouraged to shop for classes. But this is impeded by the long period of time that SCORE is simply unavailable.
While tinkering with SCORE's schedule may not be the first Princeton-related grievance that comes to student's minds, the importance of a well-balanced course schedule makes SCORE's policies surprisingly significant. By making SCORE accessible over summer months, class enrollment would run much more smoothly.
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