Poole experienced that scramble. "There I was the day of registration, running around trying to drudge up teaching," she recalls.

This confusion and frustration, many say, has been a part of graduate student life for a long time. But in her three years on the job, Urdang-Brown says, the situation has never been this bleak. "It seems unnecessary," she says. "I'm sure there's a better way to do that. The one word that keeps popping up is preregistration."

The Solution?

Shopping period is a time-worn Harvard institution in the tradition of post-winter break exams and John Harvard statue photo opportunities.

But the demise of shopping period, and its replacement with preregistration, "would make things drastically better," Poole says.

Many others agree that preregistration is the only way to ensure class size beforehand, guaranteeing teaching fellow jobs and eliminating the anxiety for graduate students.

Shopping period can also be difficult for professors, says Jo Ann Hackett, professor of the practice of Biblical Hebrew and Northwest Semitic epigraphy. Faculty members waste vast amounts of paper in unused syllabi. For an entire week attendance in lectures and seminars fluctuates.

"Sometimes you feel like you're wasting your time," Hackett says.

Some graduate students and faculty members say preregistration would be beneficial to undergraduates, allowing teaching fellows more sufficient time to prepare for the classes they will teach.

"You want to be taught by people who know something about the subject area, people who have been thinking about it during the summer," Ryan says.

Currently, Ryan says, undergraduates are in danger of getting teaching fellows "who are only half a step ahead of [them]selves."

Last semester, Poole says, she learned about her teaching assignment only 24 hours before the course began. The subject matter did not fall under her area of expertise.

"I ended up playing catch-up all semester long," she says.

The preregistration debate is far from new. It is raised about every three years, according to Director of the Physics Laboratories Margaret E. Law, the former registrar.

But Law says the plan some are suggesting--preregistration with an unlimited drop-add period--would have no impact on the crunch that comes with each new semester.