Advising Reminders for Faculty

Dates for Advising and Pre-Enrollment are to be found on the Academic Calendar.

Departmental Lottery Procedures: for your information.

Advising: Please make yourself available to your advisees during the Advising period. You might send an email inviting your advisees to sign up for a visit, or tell them your availability and/or your expectations for advising. You should be familiar with the instructions I give them, which are available online: Pre-Enrollment Instructions, or, for new students, New Student Registration Information.

After the first registration of new students, there is no form for you to sign for pre-enrollment. Your approval of the student's pre-enrollment is implicit in your not placing a hold on the student. *

The 4.5 credit limit is pertains only to the days of pre-enrollment. Once pre-enrollment is over, students may with their advisor's approval add the 5th credit, and so on, using a drop/add form.

Students going on leave or foreign study next semester might seek your advice now about the semester of their return to Swarthmore. Such students are instructed to prepare for their return semester now, particularly in regard to informally pre-registering ahead of time for "must have" courses in that return semester. See my page on Pre-Enrollment from Away.

Holds: Please give your advisees a chance to meet your advising expectations before you send me a hold on their pre-enrollment. We are assuming that the vast majority of students will comply with advising expectations, so we only need to place holds on the problem cases. As soon as you feel an advisee has not met your advising expectations, please send me an email asking me to put a hold on the student for pre-enrollment. I then send the student an email saying:

"Dear Student: Your advisor , <Advisor's name>, has placed a hold on your pre-enrollment. You must see your advisor before pre-enrolling. Students placed on hold are prevented from using the pre-enrollment program (unless/until the hold is released by the advisor). After seeing your advisor, ask that your advisor contact me right away so that the hold can be released. If you think the advisor placing the hold is not your advisor, please communicate with him or her anyway to both resolve any misunderstanding and ask to have the hold released. Any student missing pre-enrollment will miss out on all lotteries and will very likely not be able to take the classes of his or her choice. Such students can, with their advisor's permission, add classes using the Drop/Add format, but they must obtain in advance their advisor's signature."

Students usually respond very quickly to being put on hold. If you put a hold on a student who is away on leave or foreign study, please don't worry about it. If they want to pre-enroll, they will email you, otherwise you probably won't hear from the student and it won't matter. Advisor holds last only for the semester they were placed.

Pre-Enrollment: Students pre-enroll using their Banner interface, which uses web forms and is easy to use (but is unavailable to you), and for which there are extensive instructions on my web site for new and returning users. The pre-enrollment process essentially builds class lists of interested students, who then are either admitted to the class or "lotteried-out" (removed for some reason) by the department through the departmental lottery procedure which follows pre-enrollment.

Non-Swarthmore Students in classes: Students of Bryn Mawr, Haverford, U Penn, or Strath Haven High School visitors who want to take your classes should normally wait until after Swarthmore's pre-enrollment and lottery procedures are completely finished. After that, we would welcome their add forms at the Registrar's Office.