Registration: at Fairfield, the word itself carries an awful connotation. Students hear it and foreboding grimaces instantly appear on their faces. But is registration all that bad?
In a word, yes. I’ve never liked registration. In fact, I completely despise registration, and I’ll tell you why.
First, why all this preferential treatment for groups of “scholars” on campus? According to the registration handout given to us, Presidential, Fellow and Community scholars are given registration priority as part of their admission acceptance to Fairfield. This is the sort of corrupt bargain not seen since the presidential election of 1824!
Here’s how it happens: Fairfield wants to boost the SAT scores of its incoming freshman class, so they let all these “scholars” hose us normal students for the next four years. Who really loses in this situation? It’s a win-win for the school and these “scholars,” and the only ones left out in the cold are us normal students. Dommage.
I wonder just what sort of “scholarship” being a Presidential scholar entails, too. I hope it’s a Father Kelley sort of presidential scholarship (Intimate knowledge of the classics and knowing several languages fluently) and not a George W. Bush type of presidential scholarship (snorting coke, dodging Vietnam and driving drunk).
And why do these scholar students need to take all the best classes? If they’re such good students, they’d obviously do very well regardless of the course or the professor. It’s us slackers who need to register early for interesting courses with engaging professors, or else our mediocre attendance and lackluster performance will persist.
Core registration is another headache. For some reason, athletes, nurses, RAs and members of the debate team get to register early for core and elective classes.
This part of my column is just a space-filler so you can spend some time shaking your head after reading that last sentence. Done? Good.
Ordinarily I’d take the opportunity to deride the idea that RAs get preferential registration, but I am one. But other groups who get preferential treatment can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned.
Still, I don’t want to be too critical here, I want to be constructive. Here’s my two cents on how to make registration better.
Why reward people for their academic performance in high school, as is done now? Reward those that perform well here, at Fairfield. No “scholars,” no RAs, no debate team, no nurses, no athletes. Seniors register first by order of GPA, highest to lowest. Then juniors, sophomores and freshmen.
I know there are going to be a lot of people who are unhappy with this system. As a somewhat less than stellar student, this system doesn’t reward me too well. But at least it’s fair, which is more than can be said for the system in place now.
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