Instead, only “if there was clear evidence [of wrongdoing]”, would Harvard officials choose to implement punishment, he added.
But the “largest and most consequential” change in registration this fall, according to Kane, will be the switch to a primarily online course enrollment process—as opposed to the antiquated system of filling in bubbles on paper study cards.
Until last spring, College students had to pencil their chosen courses onto a paper study card, collect the required signatures from faculty and advisers, and turn it in to the Registrar’s Office at the conclusion of shopping period. While a “Course Shopping List” application has been available on the my.harvard portal for a year, it is currently used only as a scheduling aid for shopping; courses selected online by a student still had to be transferred to the study card by hand.
Starting this fall, College students will use the online shopping tool to automatically construct drafts of their study cards. When they finalize their schedules, students can print an official study card—the Registrar will contribute $1 to each student’s printing budget for the cards—and collect the required signatures from faculty and advisers on the printed form. Kane said that the process will also eliminate “bubble trouble,” the deluge of enrollment errors which regularly plagued the Registrar’s office after study cards were collected.
According to Kane, Harvard has the technology to make course enrollment completely electronic, but the administration has chosen to use a mixed system of online and in-person course enrollment to ensure that students still have face-to-face contact with academic advisers.
In contrast, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences uses a purely electronic system in which students submit their schedules online to a bevy of advisers, each of whom can electronically approve the proposal or request that it be revised.
But undergraduates at Yale, like their Cantabrigian counterparts, must still print out a final schedule to show—in person—to all of their required advisers. Administrators at both colleges acknowledge that a fully online system could negatively impact their intricate advising systems.
“There’s no substitute for sitting down with your adviser and having a conversation,” said Daria Vanderveer, an associate registrar at Yale who also advises freshmen. “I don’t know that I would want to pass up the chance to sit down and talk to them, as convenient as it would be.”
Kane—who came to Harvard in 2003 after overseeing Yale’s transition to online course registration the year before—said that his office would consider switching to electronic signatures if the new system was successful for one or two years.
“Most things are possible,” Kane said. “[But] the basic advising process will not be shifting.”
Harvard’s other registration idiosyncrasy—shopping period—has been fiercely defended by students facing proposed changes to registration in the past. In 2002, Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby proposed replacing the open-lecture period with preregistration and an extended “add/drop” period. The move prompted more than 1,000 College students to sign a petition supporting shopping period, and Kirby quickly revoked his proposal following vehement faculty opposition in the spring of 2003.
“This is in no way a step to eliminating shopping period,” Osterberg said of the online course selection tool.
In an earlier test version of the application, it was necessary to “seal” a study card—make it unalterable—before printing it out.
Aaron D. Chadbourne, chair of the UC’s Student Affairs Committee (SAC), who worked with the Registrar’s development team, said that he suspected the “seal” feature could “diminish shopping period” because any move to streamline registration potentially makes it easier to abolish shopping period in the future.
Additionally, the new registration process will force students to review and update their directory information, including new information not in the current FAS directory update utility, such as cell phone numbers and addresses. The default privacy levels for this information will also be changed this fall from level four—which dictates that contact information will “display only within Harvard, in print or electronically”—to level five—which says that information will “display in publicly accessible Harvard directories.”
This change has been enacted to “better reflect the FAS privacy policy,” according to Paige Duncan, information technology team leader for the Registrar.
That change is moving forward despite privacy concerns that arose after a streak of telemarketing calls targeted students this past spring.
Although the Registrar’s office plans to do extensive testing of the system before its fall deployment, Kane admitted that “there will undoubtedly be some glitches, as with any new application.”
—Staff Writer Brendan R. Linn can be reached at blinn@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff Writer Jonathan Tsao can be reached at jtsao@fas.harvard.edu.