Change Course Lotteries

With another semester at Harvard comes another series of course lotteries. It is a familiar story: Each shopping week, many students find themselves lotteried out of one, two, three, four, or even five classes they wanted to take. Rejection is always disappointing, albeit sometimes unavoidable. However, since students often are not notified of their status until very late into shopping week, the current lottery system leaves students not only dissatisfied but also panicked as they struggle to assemble a new schedule right before study card day. To alleviate this nerve-wracking uncertainty, Harvard should hold course lotteries earlier, allowing unlucky students more time to reorganize.

Shopping week is certainly a distinctive feature of the Harvard undergraduate experience. However, the specter of late course lotteries can turn a valuable opportunity into a scheduling nightmare. Instead of choosing classes based on careful consideration and interest, students who are rejected in such lotteries are often forced to pick random replacement classes at the last minute. Other students ask instructors to sign several different versions of their study cards in the hope that they will be lotteried into at least one of their anticipated possibilities. The current system creates unnecessary stress, defeating the experience of shopping week for many.

Instead, course lotteries should, whenever possible, be moved to before the start of school or to the earliest possible point in shopping week. If students already know the results of their lotteried classes well in advance of study card day, then they are able to explore other academic offerings in an unfettered, thoughtful way consistent with the spirit of shopping week.

We already have some precedent for this. For example, students apply to Freshman Seminars before school starts and are accordingly notified very early in the semester. This compensates for the inherent unpredictability of seminar placement and allows students ample time to adjust their schedules if necessary.

Courses that are predictably and consistently lotteried should follow this example. In fact, they are in the best position to do it. For instance, professors for these classes can make explicit that the course will be lotteried on iSites and conduct the lotteries before shopping week begins.

However, we recognize that some classes—often ones that satisfy a General Education requirement—experience sudden spikes in student interest that necessitate unforeseen lotteries. This is in large part a failure of the current pre-term planning system; however, early lotteries could still be possible. For instance, Harvard could require students to submit course preferences shortly before the semester begins, allowing professors to prepare early lotteries if necessary. If a course appeared to be oversubscribed, the instructor could hold a lottery immediately, and students would not have to suffer through an inconveniently timed waiting period.

This is, at best, an imperfect solution. Earlier course lotteries mean that students may not be able to adequately shop popular classes before they have to decide whether to lottery. Ideally, a more accurate pre-term planning system would minimize the need for lotteries in the first place. For now, a shift to earlier course lotteries would be an improvement over the current system and the last-minute scheduling frenzy it causes.