Students will be asked to pre-register for courses beginning next spring using a new online course planning tool, Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris announced at yesterday’s Faculty Meeting.

The most stressful part about Harvard is getting in, right? Wrong. On its list of the 50 Most Stressful Colleges, The Daily Beast—an online news site—ranked Harvard fifth, behind Stanford, Columbia, MIT, and Penn. The schools were ranked based on a hodgepodge of disparate categories: cost, competitiveness, acceptance rate, crime on campus, and the ranking of their engineering programs.

In an unconventional twist on final exams, students in this semester’s English 156, “Crime and Horror in Victorian Literature and Culture” will find themselves conveying their academic insights not only through their word processors, but also face-to-face with teaching staff in an oral final exam.

The Class of 2011’s “Junior 24”—the first 24 members of the Class to be elected to Harvard’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa—were announced yesterday.

In an effort to better predict class sizes each semester, College administrators are hoping to implement new course planning requirements for undergraduates next year.

Assistant Director of the Core Program Charles G. Ruberto ’88, the administration’s primary contact for students seeking information about the Core and for faculty teaching Core courses, announced in an e-mail Friday that he will be leaving for a new position outside Harvard.

While many Harvard students spent their spring breaks relaxing and traveling, some seniors remained on campus or went home last week to work on their senior theses, which were due after vacation.

Next fall, some students fulfilling the Science of the Physical Universe General Education requirement may conclude lectures with a taste test rather than a pop quiz if they enroll in a new course entitled “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter.”

For most people, the idea of writing a senior thesis is so daunting that they don’t even bother; for others, it’s a chance to show their community what all of their hard work and research has come down to. But for Anna K. Barnett-Hart ’09, who is currently a financial analyst at Morgan Stanley, her senior thesis resulted not only with honors in economics at graduation but also with an acknowledgment in author Michael Lewis’s latest book, “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.”