SCOREing at Princeton

Last December I scored for the first time ever. I am, of course, referring to the Student Course Online Registration Engine, the University's attempt to bring course registration into the 21st Century. Gone are the Byzantine course cards, the lines at the Registrar's Office, and all other archaic botherations. Students can now add and drop classes from the (relative) comfort of their dorm rooms, confident in the knowledge that somewhere in cyberspace digital Oompa-Loompas are carefully building their schedules.

I admit that I had my doubts; it seems that some unwritten law of physics requires any such project to spectacularly fail in a terrible explosion of chaos and confusion. What if the Oompa-Loompas were really sadistic little imps who threw chemical engineers into GER 520: Topics in Media and Modernity: Signal to Noise: Modernity and the Vicissitudes of the Acoustic while locking History majors into MAT 558: Topics in Geometry: Frobenius Manifolds and GW-Theory? Despite West College's best intentions, I felt sure SCORE would turn against us, complicating instead of simplifying the entire affair.

Fortunately, my worries appear to have been groundless. My own scoring was entirely anticlimactic ("Oh, so that's all it takes to score"), and even though a few friends had minor difficulties, this was probably more a product of their general ineptitude ("How do you log in?") than actual flaws in the system. So no major mishaps and no malicious cyber-gnomes. SCORE can be considered a mitigated success.

Of course, an important question remains — what's the point? Students must still print out and complete their "worksheets" (a worksheet is like a course card but bigger and more complicated), and advisors must still sign off on class selections. The only people who actually seem to save a lot of work are the employees of the Registrar's office, who happily sit back with SCORE on autopilot. Not that I begrudge them this efficiency; I'm sure they have many more important things to do than sort through thousands of manila slips. Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that SCORE saves the vast majority of the campus population very little time.

But if SCORE's benefits are marginal, it also has one very negative aspect, the absence of limited enrollment. Things used to be that a student could, based on department and seniority, secure a place in a coveted class. SCORE preserves the protection of seniority, but does nothing to give you priority in your own department. As it stands a junior in the Politics Department could be blocked out of a politics seminar by other juniors just because he happened to wake up later than they did. While serious, this problem seems readily fixable; just introduce some sort of preference for concentrators in future scorings. Late-risers should not be punished in the course selection process.

.....So on the whole SCORE seems like a good thing; it helps the Registrar's Office and its only major flaw is easily fixed. There remain the issues of the unfortunate acronym "SCORE"—at best cheesy and at worst downright dirty—and the inexplicable emails about the system being offline from 3:46 a.m. to 7:29 a.m. on alternate Thursdays, but these are minor quibbles. SCORE has survived its trial and will soon be simply another anonymous organ of the Princeton bureaucracy. So score with confidence; the Oompa-Loompas will take care of everything.

Tom Hale is a Wilson school major from Providence, R.I.