Still, I was getting increasingly freaked out as my computer clock clicked over to 7:28. Should I click the enroll button two seconds early at 7:29:58 or wait until it was officially 7:30? What if I didn’t click fast enough to get into the lab I wanted and had to cancel and start the registration for the class all over again? As the clock officially changed to 7:30, I clicked on the enroll button, hoping that all my worries were for nothing.
Six minutes later, I was swearing viciously at my computer for its incredibly slow loading time and hysterically convinced that everyone would have registered before I got on the system and I wouldn’t be able to find any classes at all. My blood pressure shot through the roof when I saw that the Monday night lab I wanted to join was full. Clicking quickly through the website, I selected another night lab and waited for SCORE to load again. I almost hyperventilated when the page showed another giant fail in the form of a red X. Somehow, in the 30 seconds since I had last clicked, the Tuesday night lab had filled up. Frantically pressing the back button on my web browser, I found out the only choices left seven minutes after SCORE had opened were the morning labs. I reluctantly grabbed one of those and marched off to my friends’ suite to have a bitch -fest about the whole process.
Every student at Princeton seems to have at least one horror story involving registering for classes on SCORE. It’s one of those horrendously stressful common experiences that we all have to go through. Many columns and editorials have been written on the topic in the ‘Prince,’ including Adam Bradlow’s 2008 column “An easier way to score,” written after his own frustrating attempt at registering for courses as a freshman. I’ve heard of stories involving slow Internet connections, sleeping through alarms set for 7:25 a.m., and getting locked out of classes because someone clicked before you or their website loaded faster. Getting into a popular class shouldn’t depend on how fast you click the enroll button or how fast your computer is able to contend with the suddenly overloaded University network.
The University doesn’t even have to look far to find a far better and fairer system for class registration. Bradlow suggested assigning students a random course draw time (in the spirit of the room draw system) as well as instituting a system that would allow students to rank their course preferences. My proposal is to institute an eBay-esque course enrollment process. (We could even get Meg Whitman ’77 to come back and design it for us!). In the spirit of equality and capitalism, each person would get a certain number of points to “bid” on classes for initial class enrollment. It would be up to the individual to decide how many points they wanted to put down on certain classes versus others. For instance, if you really wanted to get into ANT 215: Human Adaptation, you could put a majority of your points down on that class but know that you would have less of a chance of enrolling in the rest of your first-choice classes because you would have fewer points to “bid” on them with. After the deadline to “bid” on courses passed for each class, SCORE would create everyone’s class schedules based on how they “bid.” SCORE would re-open after the initial class selection so people could change their schedules depending on which courses they were accepted into during the first round.
The advantage of an eBay-esque course enrollment process over a simple ranking system is that students would be able to indicate how much they prefer one class over another. A ranking system only contains information on the order the student prefers the classes; the eBay system would reveal the magnitude of these preferences.
Even if the process of enrolling for classes were not drastically changed, there would still be many ways the current system could be improved. The University could focus more on expanding popular courses so more people could enroll, or on allowing students to be on an official waitlist for courses on SCORE instead of having to e-mail each professor individually and watch the registrar’s course offerings website like a hawk for openings. Course enrollment shouldn’t be approached with the same level of sheer anxiety as your first Advanced Placement test. Princeton students already contend with enough stress in their daily lives — SCORE shouldn’t add more.
Kelsey Zimmerman is a freshman from Glen Allen, Va. She can be reached at kzimmerm@princeton.edu.
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