First-year Jamie Edison can capture his spring pre-registration experience in a single word: stressful. Not only were two of his first-choice classes closed by the time his registration opened, so were his second-choice options. In order to take the minimum 12-credit course load, Edison had to sign up for a class that he had no plan nor desire in taking.

Despite this seemingly bleak registration experience, Edison considers himself lucky compared to the majority of first-year students who faced the brunt of an incredibly difficult pre-registration season.

“I know that some of my friends had to completely and totally rework their schedules. They probably had ten back-up classes and some of them went through all of them,” he said, a result of the fact that the majority of introductory level courses were filled by the time registration opened to first-year students.

The frustrations of registration were not limited solely to the first-year class.

“I’ve had ups and downs in registration throughout my time here. Registration is a lottery system and you don’t always get what you want and that’s to be expected. However, there are certain compromises that shouldn’t be made during registration,” said senior biology major Nat Clarke in reference to the increased sizes of courses department-wide. Of particular concern to Clarke is BIOL-350: Evolutionary Biology, one of the few seminar-style courses offered by the department.

“As of now, Evolutionary Biology has 38 students in it, whereas in the past the enrollment cap was 20 to 24 students. Given the discussion format, it’s one of the few classes in the department that necessitates a small class size. And the small size is what students most like about the class,” said Clarke.

Although Clarke was able to get into all of his first-choice classes, he says that other senior biology majors were not as lucky.

“There are senior biology majors who need to take a required class and are on the wait list, and substantially down on the wait list,” he says. According t0 Clarke, the department is currently devising solutions for individual problems, especially those of upperclassmen majors.

Clarke attributes the increased class sizes and long wait lists in his department to the fact that faculty growth has not matched increased student demand.

“The student population in the biology department has grown since I’ve been here, but the faculty hasn’t,” he said. Although the department hires visiting professors, these professors serve as sabbatical replacements.

As a result of student frustrations regarding pre-registration, the ASWC Student Affairs Committee released a survey last Thursday, Nov. 11 in order to gauge student concerns, challenges and problems they faced during registration. As of the time of publication, the survey had received 506 responses; it will remain open through the weekend.

Of all respondents,  61.4 percent said they experienced difficulty registering for classes they needed for major or distribution requirements. Sixty-seven percent rated their overall satisfaction with course availability as poor or very poor.

“There are students who are really worried that they’re not going to be able to graduate on time or be able to study abroad,” said senior ASWC Student Affairs Chair John Loranger. “It’s ridiculous that you have students who [are considering taking] summer school in order to finish their majors on time for thousands of dollars when they’re already paying 50,000 dollars to this institution.”

Loranger attributes this registration season’s overwhelming unavailability of courses to enrollment pressure and course compression, the offering of too many courses in a relatively small number of approved time slots.

“We have the largest student body ever, and yet we have not hired enough faculty. The growth of our faculty size has not kept pace with the growth of our student body,” said Loranger.

The majority of upperclassmen surveyed said they believed that the average class size has risen over the past few years.

According to Provost and Dean of Faculty Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, the office of faculty added six courses in both the fall 2010 and spring 2011 semesters.

“The net effect was to add about 500 enrollment spots over the course of the academic year,” Kaufman-Osborn said in an e-mail.

When students surveyed by ASWC were asked if they would enroll in another section of a course they wanted for their major or for distribution if it was offered at 8 a.m., 75.7 percent responded yes; when the same question was posed for the noon hour, 79.2 percent said yes.

“By the end of the year, we should be able to do a much better job of ensuring that, in any given semester, courses are adequately spread throughout the day,” said Kaufman-Osborn.

Many students attribute this year’s registration frustrations with the college’s shift from a 3-3 to a 3-2 teaching load, and many believe that course unavailability is due to the fact that more professors taught their three courses in the fall rather than in the spring, a fact that has not been verified by the office of faculty.

“So many other colleges put things in place before making the shift to a 3-2 course load in order to alleviate the pressure they knew was coming,” said Loranger. “Yet Whitman didn’t really do any of that in terms of putting in a system of curriculum management that would address course compression and those sorts of issues before the switch.”

Last week, the Faculty approved a draft proposal for the establishment of a curriculum committee.

“[The committee] should help in future years by addressing the compression of too many courses offered in the same time slots; by helping students plan better for studying abroad by providing preliminary information about what will be offered the following year; [and] by addressing any problems that might arise were the classes offered in fall versus spring to get out of balance in the future,” said Andrea Dobson, associate professor of astronomy and general studies and chair of the faculty in an e-mail.

As per Dobson, student leadership is to be consulted by the committee, although students will not have membership on it, a detail that ASWC finds disconcerting.

“Students need to be there because they’re the ones experiencing the curriculum everyday from varying perspectives,” said Loranger. According to him, student representation was not included in the proposal on the grounds that the committee will be both discussing confidential information and information that is not relevant to students. Loranger, however, believes that student representatives who sit on college and faculty committees such as the Budget Affairs Committee and the Council of Student  Affairs have proven their ability to maintain confidentiality and contends that students could simply be asked to leave the room during discussions not pertaining to them.

“[ASWC is] going to work very hard to show the faculty that students can’t be excluded from this committee,” he said.

“I understand that this is an important question for ASWC and I am discussing with [ASWC President senior] Carson Burns and John Loranger the means by which the question of student membership on this committee may be brought to the faculty for a vote,” said Dobson in response to ASWC’s concerns.

In order to address immediate pre-registration concerns, Kaufman-Osborn has said he will continue to explore opportunities to add additional seats in courses as well the addition of entire course sections when possible in order to respond to the interests of underclassmen and January starts. Since the beginning of pre-registration, the college has added a section of ENVS-120: Introduction to Environmental Studies and PSYCH-110: Introduction to Psychology. REL-260: Religion in America, Civil War to Present and HIST-325: Women and Gender in Islamic Society were also added to the spring course offerings. Kaufman-Osborn will release a letter to the student body addressing pre-registration and enrollment issues in the coming week.