The early-morning, rain-or-shine wait for admission to lower-level General Education courses is over.
Instead, all undergraduates wishing to enroll in one of the six most-frequently overapplied courses will have to pre-register this Spring, and selections will be made by course instructors over the summer. Varying percentages of each course will be reserved for incoming freshmen in the Fall.
The Committee on Educational Policy voted yesterday to end the old first-come, first-served selection for all lower-level Gen Ed courses, and to move pre-registration for the six courses up to Monday, May 24, Pre-registration will primarily affect current freshmen making their Gen Ed selections for next year, but upperclassmen mush also apply now to be admitted in the Fall.
The courses selected for pre-registration are Humanities 1, 6, and 4 (the revised version of Hum 8), Natural Sciences 5 and 6, and Social Sciences 2. Other lower-level courses, for which the Administration does not anticipate any special crowding problems, will be open to regular enrollment at Fall registration.
Robert Shenton, who will become Registrar of the College in the Fall, said that the basis of selection will be left up to the individual professors. They will also decide what number of places will be kept open for incoming freshmen. Results of the pre-registration selections will be included in the Fall Term registration envelope in September.
Previous to yesterday's ruling, 13 of 16 lower-level Gen Ed courses maintained enrollment restrictions, though not all of them had their quotas completely filled this year. Dean Ford said the CEP had found "no concrete evidence" that the courses for which restrictions are being removed will not be able to accommodate all students interested in taking them.
John H. Finley Jr. Eliot Professor of Greek Literature and a professor of Hum 1, outlined some of the "special cases" which will require restricted enrollments. The new Hum 4, for example, plans to produce a play at the Loeb as part of its course work, and therefore can accommodate only a limited number of candidates.
