As anyone who’s preregistered for a class taught by a celebrity professor like Madeleine Albright or Donna Brazile knows, when it comes to picking your courses, you can’t always get what you want. And because the exact system of how major, school, and year determine who gets which courses isn’t made public to students, many Hoyas are left guessing about what chances they have of getting into a highly sought-after class.
Instead of letting students waste their top pre-registration requests on courses they have little chance of getting into, the Registrar’s Office should make their ranking system publicly available, so that students can make more informed decisions. Students should have access to information from previous terms that includes the major, school, year, and course rankings of those who successfully enrolled in popular classes in previous terms.
A similar dilemma happens to students every semester: even though you may be a freshman in the business school majoring in marketing and accounting, your humanities side could still long to take the ever-popular (and endlessly-waitlisted) Faulkner course taught by Professor Knoll in the English department. Putting this as your number one choice during pre-registration might give you a better chance of getting in, and it might be a complete waste, leaving you scrambling to fill the empty spot in your schedule.
If students were given more complete information about their chances of landing a coveted spot in their course of choice, this type of predicament could be avoided. Advice on the logical hierarchy of preferring senior over junior, and major over non-major is already available in the pre-registration process, but exactly how much weight each factor holds should also be clearly explained.
According to John Q. Pierce, the University Registrar and Assistant Provost, the Georgetown Law School manually compiles a report of what year a student had to be and what number they ranked a course in pre-registration in order to be enrolled in it. There are fewer courses at the Law School, but this process could greatly aid students agonizing about where to rank their courses, and it should be implemented in the near future.
Pre-registration is in the process of being revamped as part of the University’s Student Information System’s impending overhaul of Georgetown’s web resources. Though it won’t be easy to create an automated program to give students an idea of what year and major they must be and what pre-registration rank they give a course in order to get into it, students deserve the tools necessary to make educated choices about their academic life.
