Coordinated Class Times Alleviate Science Conflicts

Three Harvard students helped coordinate this year's science and math schedule. The new schedule has eliminated the course conflict problems of past years, Karen Fifer '78, one of the students, said yesterday.

Fifer, Brian Leveridge '77, Eric Vager '77 and Deborah Hughes Hallet, science advisor in the Science Center, began work on the coordinated schedule last March with the approval and support of Dean Rosovsky and Ronald E. Vanelli '41, director of the Science Center.

Polling

The group polled 75 graduates and undergraduates, who filled out detailed grids. The students indicated which courses they felt, from personal experience, should not be held during the same time periods.

Using the grid results and information on the availability of lecture halls, the planning group devised a model schedule "that reflected student preferences and student conflicts," Fifer said yesterday.

The schedule in use now is a modified version of the original model which "didn't really take into account the faculty point of view," Hallet said yesterday. Most professors cooperated under the original plan, she added.

Until this year, the various science departments submitted individual time plans independent of each other. "As far as I know there was no overseeing central office to catch potential conflicts," Hallet said. Vanelli said he did not know of any such office either.

The "minimal effort at communication between the professors of the various science departments had resulted in major course conflict problems for large number of students in past years," Leveridge said yesterday.

"There are proper management techniques that had not been applied that could have substantially alleviated the problem," Leveridge, an engineering and applied physics major, said.

Conflicts "weren't so bad in the past that we couldn't handle them after the semester had already begun," Vanelli said yesterday. Departments attempted to communicate "but it didn't always work; not everything was investigated closely enough," he said.

This year there have been almost no student complaints, Hallet said yesterday. The typical "Physics I-Biochemistry 10, and Chemistry 20-Math 21 conflicts" have been avoided, she added.

"I haven't heard anything," Rosovsky said yesterday. The silence indicates that the schedule must be running well, he added.

We should have thought about it earlier, but nobody did," Rosovsky said. "I'm glad it's being done now," he added.