You better shop around

Tomorrow morning, students at Harvard University -- fresh from a post-vacation exam period -- will begin their spring semester classes. Like many of us, they will spend their day going back and forth between campus buildings, getting that first glimpse at the material that will occupy their minds and their notebooks for the next four months. But while we at Penn share much in common with our counterparts in Cambridge, Harvard students -- like those at a great many other universities -- will enjoy a luxury that we have been forced to do without. They will spend their first week of classes "shopping." Shopping, that is, not for a new wardrobe or a stack of textbooks. They'll be shopping for courses -- making their way between potential classes, determining whether the schedule, professor and curricula of a given class are right for them. "Shopping courses" is a fairly common practice at major universities nowadays, especially within the Ivy League. Yale, Brown and Columbia are among those that join Harvard in allowing their students the short grace period. Students at these universities benefit from the freedom that comes along with having a full week or more to select classes without the fear that reading assignments or substantive work will be building up. Shopping also offers professors an incentive to improve their teaching and make classes more dynamic. These professors, after all, have to compete during that first week to gain the favor of a discriminating potential class. Here at Penn, the first few weeks of each semester are filled with nothing but confusion for students and faculty alike. Students struggle to quickly hammer down a schedule while spending long hours in line at advising offices. Instructors are forced to adapt to an ever-changing group of students -- many of whom need lots of review to learn what they missed during their first week of indecision. Such headaches don't exist in a shopping system, since registration doesn't begin until the period is over. It's time for Penn to recognize the structural flaws of its registration system and enact a shopping period. By relaxing what is a hectic first week of classes, the University will be taking a big step towards improving future academic conditions for both students and faculty.

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