In past years, students could apply to an unlimited number of limited enrollment classes.

Faculty members are still allowed to select 10 percent of the seats in their sections—using any criteria they choose—and fill slots that open up after other students drop the course.

And for this spring only, the new system gave an advantage to students who were not accepted to any limited enrollment classes in the fall.

‘Mass Psychosis’?

Student reaction to the new preregistration process has been mixed.

“I think it’s a good system…it was created amid a lot of pressure so I think it’s hard for them to really hit a home run,” says MC/MPA student Andrew O. Ott. “But at the same time, it’s kind of a pain in the ass system because you have to decide, before you’re even finished shopping, what courses you want to put down on limited enrollment.”

Barnaby B. Dow, another MC/MPA, says he wondered whether the old system needed to change.

“I have a saying, ‘in the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty,’” he says. “There’s kind of a mass psychosis that’s going on around here where people are glomming on the classes that they think they have to have. I suspect that that’s really not true”

But Senior Associate Dean Joseph McCarthy, who co-chaired the committee with Paganelli, says the old system “was given more than due process.”

And student feedback has been positive, he says.

“It’s been one of those rare occasions that students have approached me and said, ‘gosh, this is working well,” he says.

Some attribute the positive response to the substantial student involvement in shaping the new policy.

“You have to remember, this was a system that was built with the input of everybody—faculty, staff and students,” says Judy Kugel, the Kennedy School registrar.

Eric M. Berger, course assistant for the limited enrollment class “Understanding the Dynamics of Negotiation,” says faculty members and course assistants welcome the new system.

“It just makes the professor’s job a little bit easier,” Berger, who is a second-year master’s of public administration student, says.