As Workday Student fully rolls out as the College’s official course registration system, students and professors this semester are dealing with waitlists and changing courses on Workday for the first time.

The new system has changed how waitlists work for many faculty who previously had personal waitlists but now must use the standardized Workday system. According to Professor of Constitutional and International Law and Government Allen Springer, his previous personal model for waitlisting was similar to Workday’s current format.

“I would take a list of everybody who emailed me and said they wanted to be on a waitlist, and I would normally just take them in the order they came in, which is probably not different from what Workday was doing,” Springer said.

However, Springer noted, his old system did allow more flexibility, as he could prioritize students who needed the class for something such as a graduation requirement.

“I would try to make sure that anybody who really needed the course could get into it, rather than somebody who just happened to be next on the waitlist,” Springer said.

The new system is more impersonal, with students getting seat offers based on their position within the waitlist.

Lecturer in Biology and Biochemistry Jake Muscato emphasized how the new waitlist system has taken a lot of control from faculty.

“Since the start of the semester now,… it’s just been automated emails out to students from Workday, and so I haven’t really engaged with it,” Muscato said. “[It’s] out of my hands more than it has been in previous semesters.”

In the spring, faculty in each department were given a time where they could reorder their waitlists.

“We did have in the spring … a moment where we could reorder our waitlist, but I think it was more to make sure that a sophomore didn’t bump out a senior, or something like that,” Springer said.

According to Professor of History and Associate Dean for Curriculum Dallas Denery, the Curriculum and Educational Policy Committee (CEP) released guidelines on reordering waitlists for faculty, which names the audience of the class and major or minor requirements as possible reasons for reordering. His office and the CEP also held training sessions to inform faculty about the guidelines.

“We did understand that things may happen and certain students need a course to graduate, or for whatever reason, in which case we gave criteria like this,” Denery said.

The CEP’s policy also includes a note saying that faculty should over-enroll classes, if they choose to do so, in the order of the waitlists.

However, Denery said, this is the only guidance his office or the CEP has given to faculty regarding waitlisting.

“That’s really the only real concern, right? If it’s not just going to be first come first serve, then it’s, ‘On what basis do faculty reorder the wait list?’” Denery said.

For Registrar Martina Duncan, the Workday waitlist model has been an improvement. Duncan cited increased transparency for students as a major area in which Workday has been better than Polaris.

“[Waitlisting] is one area where we have learned some new things that we will need to address, but given that our old waitlisting process was not at all transparent to students, and faculty were managing their lists in many ways, I do think this is an improvement,” Duncan wrote in an email to the Orient.

Professor of Mathematics Adam Levy said that one benefit of the Workday system is that it removes the influence of faculty opinions about students.

“There was a lot of potential for abuse with that kind of personal custom thing, where it’s about relationships and navigating relationships with faculty for students. So I can appreciate why we changed to this more kind of bureaucratic method, where the students know exactly where they are on the waitlist, and it’s not due to some special preference that they don’t understand,” Levy said.

However, Levy added, it makes it harder for students to get into classes that are at the enrollment limit. If a seat opens, the first person on the waitlist must respond before it moves down.

“The way the system works is whoever’s number one on the list, I believe, gets an offer when a seat opens up and they have 24 hours,… and so that day passes before number two gets even an opportunity,” Levy said.

Denery agreed with the positive side of the new system, highlighting the equity benefits of the new waitlist model.

“If a faculty member knows a student … [they might think], ‘Oh, I like this student…. I’m going to put them at the top of the waitlist,’ which sounds like a great thing. But then … that means a lot of other students who haven’t even had the opportunity to study with that faculty member don’t get a chance to…. So it was considered sort of an equity thing to try to focus on who the class is for and who needs the class,” Denery said.