Planning Fails to End TF Shuffling

Professors for some of the largest spring course offerings said that the utility of the College’s experiment with pre-term planning remains unclear given the disparity between pre-registration numbers and the final enrollment for their classes.

The tool, released in November, required students to mark down those classes they expected to take in the spring. But enrollment numbers in some cases remained unpredictable, forcing professors to readjust the number of teaching fellows for their courses.

“We have wonderful TFs, but we had to go scramble to find them,” said English Professor Louis Menand, who teaches U.S. in the World 23: “Art and Thought in the Cold War.”

He said that the inaccurate pre-term planning numbers compounded the usual troubles that surround the TF hiring process.

Menand had originally hired TFs based on previous years’ enrollments of approximately 260 students. But upon seeing the pre-term planning numbers—which indicated that only 146 students were planning to enroll—Menand had to reassign TFs to other classes.

When, in fact, 339 students signed up for his class, Menand had to race over the weekend to restaff the class.

“We had to go through the process twice,” Menand said. “I lost some TFs I had wanted.”

For new classes, pre-term planning numbers were the only predictors available to make staffing decisions. But Senior Lecturer in History Ivan Gaskell, who is co-teaching U.S. in the World 30: “Tangible Things: Harvard Collections in World History,” said that the predicted enrollment of 66 did not reflect the eventual 250 students who registered

or the class. The class has since hired five additional TFs to join the original four and moved from Sever 113 to the larger Yenching Auditorium.

Yet some professors said that when they originally received unexpected pre-term planning numbers, the data allowed them to begin planning for larger class sizes in January. When the numbers indicated that nearly 100 more students planned to take Psychology 15: “Social Psychology” than had in previous years, Professor Joshua D. Greene ’97 began looking for more TFs.

While fewer students eventually enrolled in the class than the pre-term planning data had indicated, Greene said that having rough knowledge about a larger class size smoothed the transition into the new semester.

According to Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris, minimizing last-minute TF shuffling is one of the top goals of pre-term planning.

“My main concern is really to make sure that we’re putting the best prepared people in the classroom,” he said.

Harris said that it is still too early to determine the accuracy of the pre-term planning predictions. He said the Office of Undergraduate Education will not finish its analysis until the end of this week at the earliest.

—Staff writer Stephanie B. Garlock can be reached at sgarlock@college.harvard.edu.