The guidelines are an attempt by the graduateschool to introduce order to this market while notresorting to pre-registration, Fox said.

"I'm certain that graduate students would verymuch like to have these things settled as early aspossible," Bol said.

The freedom Harvard provides for professors insetting up courses and for students in choosingcourses will into the term, after a "shoppingperiod," is the prime reason behind thedisorganization of the TF hiring system, Fox said.

While the guidelines will have no effect onthis term's TF selections, results will likely beobvious as soon as this spring, when professorsare expected to begin hiring their TFs for fallsemester courses.

"I don't know that this will work, but I thinkthat every effort that is made is for the better,"Bol said. "It can't hurt."

But one Council member said that the system wasfine before the new guidelines were imposed. Stonesaid had he had no problem with the unstructurednorm of the past.

"I've always had excellent TFs, and I thinkthat my students would say the same," Stone said."Sometimes they have even been undergraduates.Sometimes they have approached me, and sometimes Ihave approached them."

But Stone conceded that not all professors atHarvard share his luck. "I suspect thatproblematic TFs are more of a difficulty in thehumanities than in the sciences," he said