Register.Harvard.Edu

Last March, University Hall withdrew its misguided preregistration plan in the face of a barrage of valid concerns voiced by students and faculty. In that chorus of complaints, a prominent strain was that by effectively eliminating the College’s cherished shopping period, administrators would have transformed the beginning of each semester into a nightmare of rubber stamps and signatures as students scrambled to configure their schedules. But even the comparative ease of a preregistration-free study card day is in need of an update—an update that modern technology has placed well within the registrar’s reach.

When Harvard’s current undergraduates were born, the idea of a campus connected by lightning-quick Ethernet connections—building multi-media projects and watching lectures on personal computers—was science fiction. But two decades later it has become wasteful for students to use pencil, paper and legwork to register for their courses at the start of the term or to add and drop them later on. Call it laziness, or call it efficiency, but a website on which students could carry out these time-consuming necessities from the comfort of their dorms would work wonders for the already-hectic schedules of the term’s first weeks. One imagines that the current system’s archaic array of hand-filled forms and in-person visits is not all that different from the way scholars cleared their studies with the dons at Medieval Cambridge and Oxford; the transition to online registration seems almost less a matter of joining the twenty-first century than of leaving the fourteenth behind.

Of course, not all the face-to-face meetings involved with course selection are as inevitably useless as the study card hand-offs a week after registration. Submitting potential schedules for the review of academic and concentration advisors could be an enlightening, meaningful part of the intellectual experience at Harvard—“could” being the operative word. For most students, meetings with concentration advisors are often impersonal wastes of time that involve waiting in line in their House dining halls for the opportunity to have a 30-second chat about how many requirements they have yet to complete. Such banal academic babysitting could all too easily be replaced by point-and-click approvals. Online, advisors could be provided with a student’s class selection, accompanied by lists of courses that the individual has completed and needs to complete. After a brief perusal, advisors could then contact those students whose schedules are suspect—young scholars entering their Junior springs without any cores under their belts or students who signed up for Mathematics 263, “Vector Bundles on Algebraic Curves” without taking any of the prerequisites. And electronic registration will only make true academic consultation easier: once Harvard’s advising system gets the repairs it desperately needs, the age of e-mail will allow advisors and their students to schedule necessary meetings quickly—or simply communicate about course selection over the network.

Similarly, professors would retain control over enrollment in their seminars and the power to accept or deny students who wish to join their courses later in the semester. Student-professor meetings could still take place in person, but an easy-to-use online interface would eliminate bureaucratic hassles and give professors more control over their classes.

With a new registrar at Harvard, the time is right to make the move to the Web. It is important that the registrar’s office devote the requisite time and resources to design a registration website—a malfunctioning online system would be worse than none. Perfecting a system that would play such a key role in students’ academic lives is not a process that should be rushed, but there is no excuse not to get that process underway. The convenience that would come with a fully-functional website for course registration and the add-drop process is significant, while the difficulty in programming one is not. With any luck, the idea will register: there’s no reason to put it aside any longer.

Dissent: Don't .Com our Advising

The Staff is fully justified in calling for improvements to the currently dismal course advising system, as it has done time and again. But online filing of study cards would seriously undermine the College’s efforts in that direction. Instead, it would serve to permanently transform the current system, which has the potential to be rectified, into one of impersonal, amazon.com-style course registration.

By further facilitating passive course selection with little or no input from experienced advisers, the move to an online system would further diminish confidence in the value of the advising system on the part of both students and their advisors. Printed study cards consume an insignificant single sheet of paper per student each semester, and the accumulation of a few signatures is little to ask of students to avoid the non-advice of “point-and-click” advising.

—Daniel B. Holoch ’06 and Phoebe Kosman ’05