In the midst of registration, the student body can be heard grumbling about everything from what classes they couldn't get into to what teachers wouldn't overload them.
Underlying many complaints about registration, however, is the issue of what day students get to register on. Currently, Geneseo bases registration dates off of the number of credits a student has. Ideally, this would allow for seniors to register first, juniors second, and so forth.
As students accumulate more credits throughout their semesters, they would earn earlier and earlier registration times. The problem exists though, when it comes to splitting specific classes into registration dates.
In order to split classes into multiple days, transferred Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate credits accumulated throughout high school get factored in. This then allows those students who came to Geneseo with more credits from high school to have a better selection of classes than those who did not, which is not entirely fair.
The problem with allowing AP and IB classes to count towards registration dates is that it penalizes students whose schools either did not offer certain AP or IB classes or did not allow them to take more than a set amount. In addition, students who opted to go the Regents route rather than the AP/IB route are unfairly penalized.
Students who did not take these advanced classes already have to take more core classes than those who received college credit; further punishing these students by consistently assigning them a later registration date semester after semester seems to be unnecessary.
To remedy this problem, registration dates should be based only on credits earned after high school. This way, those students who were not given the opportunity to take select AP or IB classes will not feel the effects of them semester after semester until they graduate.
When coming to college, every student should be able to start out with a clean slate. We all applied and got into the same institution, based on the work we put in during high school. Which classes our individual high schools offered, however, should not have an effect on which classes we are closed out of in college.