Currently, students select a small list of prospective courses for the next semester at the end of the previous semester, and then, with their advisor’s approval, preregister for those courses on SCORE. This system has a number of features that encourage students to make final decisions about classes well before they have had the opportunity to shop: The preregistration process itself is long and involved; SCORE and individual advisors tend to place a low cap on the number of courses in which students may enroll; and it can be a hassle to contact advisors during the first weeks of the semester to approve course changes. Moreover, enrollment on SCORE determines whether students receive course e-mails and have access to restricted portions of a course’s Blackboard website. Because students cannot enroll in every class that they’re interested in, they are sometimes prevented from meaningfully engaging with the courses they are shopping.
Due to these policies, students often fail to take full advantage of shopping period. To amend these problems, the University should create a more liberal shopping period that permits students to enroll in as many courses as they like for the first two weeks of the semester. Seminars and other courses that have strict limits on enrollment size, or that require an application, might need to retain some features of preregistration. But aside from that, students would be full participants in all of the classes in which they were interested. Students would not be encouraged to finalize courses until the end of shopping period, at which point they would be much better informed about the suitability of their proposed courses to their interests than they were months before the start of the semester.
Admittedly, this new system would present logistical difficulties such as scheduling precepts or assigning classrooms. Nonetheless, other universities — most notably Yale — have succeeded in making it work; while there might be some initial confusion, we have confidence in the Registrar’s ability to solve these logistical problems. The new system would encourage students to make full use of the shopping period, permitting them to make better-informed course decisions and improving the quality of their academic experience at Princeton.
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