The Cases For and Against

Preregistration

The major arguments in favor of preregistration claim it will improve the Faculty’s abilities to meet the pedagogical needs of undergraduates.

Though not a “panacea to cure all our ills,” Dean of Undergraduate Education Benedict H. Gross ’71 says preregistration is worth a shot.

He says he believes a chief advantage of the proposed system will be the fact that it will allow the Faculty more time to advise students on their course selection. Requiring students to pick their classes months in advance should give their advisers a more adequate amount of time to discuss with students whether these choices are really the best for their academic careers.

“No one pretends the advising we’re doing in the first week of the term is good advising,” Gross says.

Wolcowitz expressed the same hopes that preregistration would be a way to work towards better advising at Harvard.

“We have the opportunity to do a far better job of advising when those mandated conversations happen at a different point in time,” Wolcowitz says.

But Undergraduate Council President Rohit Chopra ’04 says preregistration will not cure Harvard’s advising ills.

“The advising system’s broken for other reasons,” he said. “It’s about whether head tutors and concentration committees have the time and the staff to do advising.”

Knowing course enrollments the semester before they have to teach a course would also allow professors to present more concrete job offers to potential TFs, leading to less scrambling for jobs among graduate students and allowing them more time to prepare their course materials and teaching plans, says Gross. He also says course instructors would be able to start teaching in earnest right away without the transitory and uncertain nature that shopping period can entail.

John Girash, senior teaching consultant at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, echoes Gross’ belief that early course selection would provide graduate students with improved job security that would ultimately make them better teachers.

“There are certain courses where they have to hire people at the last minute; those TFs are thrown into the classroom without having any opportunity for pre-semester training,” Girash says. “The hope is around here that [preregistration] will at least give the opportunity for more TFs to know that they’re teaching and to take advantage of our services and our interdepartmental training.”

Currently, about 400 TFs attend the Bok Center’s fall teaching conference, and about half that amount go to the winter session.

“We don’t face shortages as much as we face problems getting our graduate students into appropriate TF positions, and they often don’t know until the last minute,” says William Mills Todd III, chair of the Department of Comparative Literature.