The plan is to lottery large courses during the two weeks after preregistration, allowing for teaching staffs to be selected months in advance of the semester. Because of missing information and bad timing, opportunistic students will likely sign up for classes that have lotteries, even if they are not necessarily going to enroll, just to preserve space in case they decide to take them. For students who decide in the first week that they would like to get into a class with a lottery, however, it will already be too late.

First-year students—exempt from preregistration under the proposed system—will have spots reserved for them in lotteried classes in the fall. Essentially, a first-year quota for these classes will be put in place. At worst, not enough first-years will want to take the class; at best, first-years will undergo an entirely separate lottery, a bizarre and inefficient system.

Preregistration will also hamper professors who, busy during term-time with classes and research, currently use intersession to compile syllabi and decide on the precise topics that their courses will cover. Under the new system, these decisions will have to be rushed or prepared much further in advance to get the information to students in November.

If the major cost of preregistration is that students are less likely to end up in the classes that are best suited for them, then the main benefit is that it gives professors better enrollment figures for their classes—allowing professors to hire Teaching Fellows (TFs) with more certainty. But if students are primarily preregistering for classes with lotteries or are adding and dropping as frequently as we would hope, preregistration will not greatly improve estimates.

Even if preregistation improved class size predictions—allowing for additional training of graduate TFs—there is no indication that the quality of instruction would improve. There is no evidence that undergraduates are more dissatisfied with newly-hired TFs than with those who were picked months in advance. In fact, the most common complaint among students stems from communication problems, a deficiency that needs to be addressed but will not be cured by preregistration.

The preregistration proposal soon to face the faculty would almost certainly lead to greater undergraduate dissatisfaction with classes. Courses will be filled with less enthusiastic students, administrators and professors will be busied with unnecessary bureaucracy and instituted lottery systems will be unfair. Everyone stands to lose. There may be problems with shopping period as it presently stands, but the implications of preregistration lead to disturbing repercussions for undergraduate education at Harvard. If the Faculty has respect for the needs of students, it will destroy this preregistration proposal when it has the chance.