Editorial: Releasing precept information

When professors explain the procedures for precept enrollment, they rarely reveal which instructors are assigned to which precept. There are, ostensibly, good reasons for such a policy: Whether because they believe the professor’s precept will be better than a graduate student’s or because they want the opportunity to get acquainted with a well-known figure, a great number of students would likely dash to sign up for the professor’s precept, resulting in confusion and inconvenience. Better that students are sorted randomly using a tool on Blackboard.

However, the reality is that the selection of students in the professor’s precept is usually not even close to random. In just about every lecture, there inevitably exists a group of students who discover when the professor’s precept convenes. They might be able to do so because older students have told them when the professor’s precepts were held in previous years (the schedule is sometimes surprisingly regular), or students who are already friendly with the professor in some capacity can find out from him or her when he or she will be teaching. This practice is problematic for a couple of reasons. First, if a general policy not to share the professor’s precept times is in place, it seems manifestly unfair that a few students could, through access to information not available to other students, practically ensure that they will get in. Secondly, however self-deprecating many of our professors are, it is very often the case that the professor’s precept is better than the other available precepts. That some students are denied a better academic experience because of other students’ “insider” knowledge seems flat-out wrong. Moreover, because the strongest recommendations in applications for internships, jobs and postgraduate institutions tend to come from professors rather than graduate student preceptors, it’s not entirely a stretch to suggest that students who can regularly get into professor’s precepts have an advantage on such applications. Blackboard’s precept assignment tool should still be random, but professors should inform students of who teaches which precept.

Furthermore, providing more information about precept instructors would have benefits beyond equalizing access to the professor’s precept. Many students in fact prefer to be in a graduate student’s precept — they may feel that they learn better when presented with material by two different instructors, for example, or they may feel that they’ll get a better grade. Students could also choose their precept preferences in part based on which graduate students were assigned to which precepts. This increased information about who’s teaching which section — as we have recommended in the past — should be accompanied by the Registrar’s making past evaluations of specific graduate student preceptors available on its existing course evaluation website.

Though openly announcing precept times may cause some problems, it would increase the chances that students end up in the right precept for them and equalize access to what is commonly the most coveted slot — the precept with the professor. Given how important precepts are to so many Princeton courses, this change ought to be implemented.