The start of classes is an exciting time in the opening weeks of school. For many students, however, class-scheduling issues dampen the energetic mood with an unwanted frustration.
“I know a lot of people who arrived at school with incorrect schedules and tried to change into the classes they had signed up for only to find out that the class was already full,” commented Caitlin Condon ’08. “It’s definitely hard to start off school with lots of class switches.”
With over eight hundred students on campus, the Registrar’s office, which oversees scheduling classes for the entire student body and faculty, has its hands more than full in the months leading up to September.
The office begins the class-scheduling process in February when the current students in all forms make course requests for the following academic year with their advisers. The next large-scale course request submission comes in late May and early June when the new students mail in their choices. Then the Registrar’s Office works on “nothing but schedules starting the last two weeks in June and ending in early August,” said Ms. St. James, the head of the Registrar’s Office. The form deans return to campus in late August and finalize all of their respective students’ schedules.
The scheduling sounds like a simple process, but creating class schedules to fit the needs of all the faculty and students is quite difficult. The technology magic behind the class scheduling is a program called WinSchool, which Choate has been using since 2000. The Registrar’s Office has to move all the course request data from IQ web to the WinSchool program in order to create the master schedule for all students and faculty. The WinSchool program fulfills the basic scheduling needs, but it isn’t perfect and the registrar’s office is hoping to replace the technology with a more sophisticated program in around two years. A complaint Ms. St. James has with the current software is that the program does not take into account gender when distributing students in classes, and this omission sometimes results in an unbalanced gender ration in the classroom, which the registrar’s office has to then manually fix.
“This is the most hectic time, these first few weeks of fall. New students are returning and realizing that they’re taking the wrong courses, and seniors similarly are making a flurry of changes to their schedules as the pressure of a strong college application sets in,” explained Ms. St. James. “We try to be flexible and fluid in the registrar’s office in terms of scheduling classes. If we had a rigid system, fewer people would have their needs met.”
Of course there are downsides to a more relaxed schedule system. In the summer, as Ms. St. James is deciding which classes will meet during which blocks and filling classes based on students’ course requests, she has to cap many commonly taken classes at seven or eight students to leave room for those students who may change their schedules in the opening weeks of the fall term. But every year some of these capped classes to not fill up and must be collapsed, meaning eliminated from the schedule.
“We will never kill a course that offers a distinct area of expertise such as AP French Lit or the Spanish Don Quixote class. These types of unique classes are vital for the school. At the same time though, for the more common classes we’re not going to put a huge load on a teacher by making them teach an extra class with only a few students if these students can be moved to other sections,” Ms. St. James said. “It is important to have faculty energies allocated correctly.”
Like all things concerning class scheduling, eliminating a class from the master schedule is an involved procedure. Ms. St. James said she must first examine the schedules of all the students in the under-enrolled class to ensure that they can switch to a different section of the same level class “without having their schedule butchered.” Next, the possibility of the class elimination will be reviewed by Mr. Farrell, the dean of faculty, and by Mrs. Wallace, the dean of academic affairs, before it will officially be stricken from the schedule. Interestingly, adding a sixteenth student to a class undergoes the same step-by-step process.
“There is no bureaucratic, heavy-handed registrar at Choate, which is why we can make these course eliminations and add students to already full courses; it gives a larger school a smaller feel,” said Ms. St. James. She also noted that when Mr. Shanahan “changed the school over to the block schedule, class distribution throughout the week became easier, despite the fact that there were new limits on the size of classes.”
“The quality of the teaching and learning is very important to Choate,” emphasized Mr. Shanahan. “When I first arrived here, there would be eighteen or nineteen students in a class, far too many to allow for good conversations. This is what prompted me to set a limit on the number of students per class, but of course these limits aren’t set in concrete. There’s always going to be the frustrated student who wanted to get into a popular class, but it’s more important for the school to take advantage of the great student to faculty ratio.”
The faculty does not seem to mind accommodating larger classes when necessary. “I don’t mind having a big class,” said Mr. Stewart, whose World History and AP US History courses often have sixteen students in a class. “I’d hate to see someone withdrawn from a class because of a limit on the number of students.”
In addition to an automatic scheduling program, the registrar’s office has the eight form deans adjusting and reviewing student schedules starting the week preceding the start of classes. But the deans do wish there was a way to alleviate the stress caused by class schedules in the first weeks of school.
“We deal with pretty much nothing except scheduling the first half of September,” said Ms. Miller, the fifth form girls’ dean, in a sit-down lunch conversation.
Other deans had similar sentiments. “I’m afraid I might be too busy fixing schedules to fit an interview into my schedule to talk about schedules,” laughed Mrs. Dean, the sixth form girls’ dean, upon an initial interview request. “The week before school starts, the deans are working twelve hour days fixing schedules, and even into the start of classes it is one hundred percent scheduling for us. It’s quite hectic.”
Senior Caitlin Condon ’08 agreed with her dean about the schedule madness: “Luckily because I moved into school early, I was able to fix my classes with Ms. Dean before the onslaught of angry seniors arrived.”
Dean of Academic Affairs Mrs. Wallace acknowledged that there were many courses and it was hard to make everyone happy. “But there seemed to be no more schedule changes than usual this fall, and we’re trying our best to have all students’ academic needs met.”
Of the scheduling system as a whole Ms. St. James says, “It’s a big puzzle, and it’s a lot of fun to work on. By and large I think every student and teacher gets the schedule he or she needs, even if it might not be the classes originally desired. It can be frustrating for a few, but we’re trying to make the best schedule for the school as a whole, and for the most part we accomplish that.”
