Course registration can be a stressful process on many college campuses, but students at Emory University have channeled their frustration into creative solutions—some more ethical than others.
The university’s stratified registration process gives priority access to students who have earned the most credits, such as seniors and juniors, and students who hold merit scholarships. So crafty students have devised a way to game the system: Those with earlier registration times enroll in courses to save spots for their friends, who arrange to pick up those class spots during the university’s “add-drop-swap” open-enrollment period, in the last weeks of a semester.
Some students even enroll in popular classes to try to sell their spots to others, according to some undergraduates.
“I’ve definitely heard it’s happened,” said Priyanka Krishnamurthy, a senior. “I’ve seen Facebook statuses: ‘I’m willing to pay anybody who drops this class.’” In one case, students told a professor, the price for a spot in a prime course, such as a chemistry class or business-school prerequisite, was advertised at $100.
The practice is considered a violation of Emory’s honor code because it confers “unfair academic advantage” on those who have not earned it, according to Joanne Brzinski, senior associate dean for undergraduate education.
Payoffs for class slots have occurred, she said, and have been advertised via social-media posts. But Ms. Brzinski believes there have been only a handful of such cases.
“Quite frankly, that’s the sort of thing we’re more concerned about than anything,” she said. “It would mean that students who can afford to pay for courses get an advantage.”
Entrepreneurial Students
During the summer of 2013, before his senior year at Emory, Michael Sacks devised a more systematic solution to the enrollment problem. He came up with a website, Add Drop Swap, that would allow Emory students to anonymously enter courses in which they were enrolled and to request courses they would like to swap for them.
“Because of the way Emory labels a class with a unique number, it’s very easy to make a website that would just match requests,” Mr. Sacks said. “There are tons of people who will switch around for that.”
Mr. Sacks tried to pitch university officials the idea of approving his website as a tool for switching courses. He said that although Ms. Brzinski expressed interest in learning more about it, the site was blocked on the campus because of administrators’ concerns that it could facilitate the saving and selling of course slots.
Ms. Brzinski denied that the site had been blocked and said that using it is not inherently an honor-code violation. A representative of Emory’s information-technology department said it does not keep records on previously blocked websites.
Despite the university’s ambivalence, Mr. Sacks said his site had received hundreds of class-swap requests from students. He set up the website to accommodate the registration systems at the University of Chicago and the University of Southern California, and he is considering promoting it at the University of California at San Diego, where he is now taking courses in mobile-app development.
To alleviate student frustration and combat potentially problematic grass-roots solutions, the university is testing a new online wait-list system this semester for about 50 classes. The system will automatically enter students on the list when seats become available.
“It makes electronic what students were trying to do outside of the registration system in dysfunctional ways,” Ms. Brzinski said. “We have very entrepreneurial students—they see a problem and try to solve it. I admire that. But sometimes they don’t think it through.”