Some follow up to yesterday's class session.

On Class Scheduling and Excess Demand for Some Classes

In our discussion we did not consider other factors that might influence student demand for a course.  These include the time of day the course is offered and whether the offering is contiguous to another class the student is already scheduled to take.  I don't know if this is a universal preference or not, but I've learned from students in the past that they prefer having classes back to back, which gives them more free time of their own. 

Given the above, perhaps one way to manage excess demand in popular courses is to schedule them at 8 AM.  This would be a deliberate attempt for the scheduling itself to screen out the non-serious students, knowing that 8 AM classes are not high on the preferences of most students.  There might be another reason for scheduling more 8 AM classes.  As enrollment growth continues to happen, it is university strategy now to encourage that growth,  classrooms will become increasingly scarce.  We did talk about moving demand from the peak to off the peak, but we didn't do that with respect to class scheduling.  Insisting on more course offerings at 8 AM would be a way to do that.  It would require for the expectations of students to change, in a way they might not like at first.  I wonder if it became the usual practice whether students would get used to it. 

Now let my suggest a hypothetical that would offer an alternative to the current course registration process.  Instead, students would submit their preferences about what courses they would like to take, what courses they need to take for their degree requirements, and other related preferences (courses in the same building, preferred times,  and perhaps other factors as well.  Then an algorithm (something like the Medical Intern Matching Program) would produce initial schedules for all students.  The regular add/drop process would follow after that. Further, how the students did with their allocation in previous semesters would be tracked as follows.   Students who dropped courses after day 10, without getting the consent of their advisor, would have their priority lowered in the next registration round.  The idea is to punish the course hoarding approach.   The schedules that were produced by the algorithm would deliberately not be perfect from the point of view of their preferences.  In other words, if the campus deliberately went to an approach that emphasized 8 AM classes, then the burden of taking those classes would need to be shared.  So the algorithm would include this obligation, but then try to give students their first preference in some other course offering.

I want to close this section with a different observation.  When this class was taught at 11 AM, some students regularly came late to class.  I queried a few of them about it and among them many reported that they took another class before mine, which was on the Engineering Quad.  Getting from there to my classroom  took more than the 10 minutes allowed between classes.  So, in this case it seemed unavoidable.   This semester there are several students who are arriving late to class.  I'm guessing that for most of them our class is the first one in the day for them.  So, I'd like to know what explains the lateness and if there is any way to prevent it from happening in the future.

Ethics and Procurement

As I recently had to complete the University's mandatory ethics training, I want to note that it has specific prohibitions regarding accepting gifts from vendors, particularly those already doing business with the University and/or those submitting proposals under an RFP process.  Let me also note that it is pretty common business practice, including by units of the University, to give out tchothcke with the company's branding to clients and to potential customers.  Items include pens, tee shirts, coffee mugs, and squeeze balls (for reducing stress).  The practice is so widespread that an absolute ban on acceptance of this type of stuff seems foolhardy.   The University rules on not accepting gifts from vendors refer to "bribes" that are one or two orders of magnitude more expensive.   

But the reality is that in most cases the University can't monitor that these vendor gifts are being accepted.  So we should ask why a person in a position to grease his or her own pockets refrains from doing so.  I think it is easier to first consider the opposite.  If the person is angry at the University for feeling the person has been treated poorly, that mindset encourages accepting the vendor's gifts.  More generally, if the employer wants to encourage employees to act ethically, treating them well might be an effective approach.  One way to look at it is that the employee then fears loss of a good job, so the taking of the vendor gift comes with some risk.  A different way, however, is from an Akerlof gift-exchange point of view.  If the employee feels well treated, the employee is more inclined to honor the wishes of the employer. 

There is a temptation by regulators and policy makers to solve this problems via extensive rules that requires lots of monitoring and indeed may become so cumbersome as to be counterproductive.  My own view is that broad guidelines coupled with an approach that encourages trust in the employees is a better way to go.