YC Administration Puts Lid on Student Sale of Courses

A Yeshiva College student was recently reprimanded for selling his classes, according to YC Associate Dean Fred Sugarman. The student had enrolled in several courses during registration last semester, and then sold his places in the classes after they closed.

The student's misdemeanor comes at a time when YC is working to raise its academic standards through a number of endeavors, including faculty hires and the YC curriculum review.

"YU is on an upward curve in terms of academic excellence," said Dean Sugarman. "Over the next five years, fifty new professors will be hired. The behavior that encourages easier classes should be discouraged so our students take excellent classes and receive a wonderful education."

Although the student did not technically violate academic standards, the administration felt his actions could not go unpunished. "His action was completely unethical," said Dean Sugarman.

YC Dean David Srolovitz concurred with his colleague that the actions of this student were unacceptable. "Yeshiva College's goal is to have all students compete on an equal footing, whether this is for registration, exams or grades," said Dean Srolovitz. "The most recent example of circumventing the system to gain advantage was particularly egregious and raises significant ethical issues. We look forward to the day when our system is capable of preventing abuses and yet is unnecessary."

The student's punishment involved an unidentified number of community service hours. "I thought community service was the best course of action, yet if this happens again there may be harsher punishments in store," said Dean Sugarman.

Measures are being taken to prevent such actions, but, as Dean Sugarman emphasized, this is an unusual event. Among these measures is the Banner Registration software's new waitlist feature, which notifies students when a place opens in a class.

This feature, however, would not solve registration problems completely, according to Ms. Andrea Burdick, university director of student academic records. The waitlist feature "does not eliminate the problem of student 'A' registering for the course, then dropping it in conjunction with student 'B,' who will add it as soon as the drop processes," she explained. "Student 'B' in this example would "cut" the wait list by having worked in concert with Student 'A.'"

Other options are being explored to resolve this issue.

Dean Srolovitz described one of Ms. Burdick's ideas for solving registration issues. "I think Andrea's suggestion of automatically limiting full classes by setting the enrollment limit to zero is excellent and I sympathize with her idea of not doing this for all courses (to keep the registration process as customer friendly as possible), We are certainly willing and able to provide the Registrar's office with a list of such classes. Although we won't get it "right" all of the time, we have a pretty good idea of where the "hot" courses are."