It's happens to everyone.

You search the CUE Guide looking for a class with favorable--and less than difficult--ratings. But when you arrive, you find that 200 others have discovered the same thing. You can barely breathe, much less find a seat or a syllabus.

And the next day you're lotteried out.

Maybe you decide to brave the endless sourcebook line in the basement of the Science Center only to discover as you reach the bottom of the stairs the little post-it note on the sourcebook board declaring that the class's main required reading is sold out.

Finally, you decide what to take. But that means a trip to the Coop, where there's only one tattered copy of one of the 15 required books.

Such are the trials of Harvard's shopping period, the week of classes when students attend about twice as many classes as they could possibly take. They search for the most appealing time schedule, most appealing requirements--and, of course, the most appealing professor.

Now that all undergraduates have been through it at least once, the question looms: is shopping period more hassle than it's worth?

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences started debating that issue in 1961, Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology Irven DeVore said last spring.

And the idea of preregistering for classes resurfaced at Faculty Council meetings last May. But rather than take any definite position, the council simply decided the issue was worth further discussion.

The council may opt to discuss the relative merits of shopping period again this year.

While the council was out on the issue, Harvard undergraduates and professors have again undergone the semi-annual rite.

"I had the usual loosely organized chaos during the first two lectures of [Computer Science] 121, with about 105 students showing up in a lecture hall with 88 seats for a class that had about 75 students last year," Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 said in an e-mail message over the weekend.

Professors and administrators say larger-than-expected attendance is the biggest problem with shopping period, while those responsible for producing course materials complain of too much guesswork.

"The people who run the Core program look at the schedules and look at enrollment for past years and make reasonable guesses," says William G. Witt, copyright officer in the Office of Sourcebook Publications.

"There are surprises every year," Witt says. "One year a class may have had 200 students, and this term it has 500 students."

Both Witt and Allen E. Powell, general manager of the Coop, admit that the result of in-semester registration is that sourcebooks and textbooks sell out and must be reordered, resulting in assignment delays for students and headaches for their professors and teaching fellows.