Apparently, law students at NYU were negotiating this fall–using Starbucks, money, and cookies–to get into certain law school classes. Clearly, this is a fantasy for law professors “My class is so popular that one student baked 3 dozen brownies to get in!” but a nightmare for students. As the New York Post wrote, NYU operated without a waitlist so that students could game the system, dropping their coveted slot right before the person who paid them would get on the registration system to take their place. And, although NYU denies that any transactions ever took place, graduated students beg to differ. As one student put it,
“People have been buying and selling classes ever since I started,” said Colin George, who graduated in May. …”We believe in the free market, and we think that we should be able buy things that are valuable to us,” George said. “Our job is to find our way around rules.”
Comments filed after the ABA Journal blogged on this story are completely polarizing about whether or not this is a good solution. Now, I am all about giving students real world experience in negotiation but agree that having to negotiate with one’s classmates for courses is ridiculous. (Actually, brownies to the professor would be much better!) Apparently, NYU agrees and will be instituting a wait-list next year.
A similar situation developed at my undergrad school fin regards to on-campus housing sign-up. The school required students to live on campus for three years and of course students with the highest number of earned credits got first priority in choosing rooms. Therefore, as a sophomore or junior you could ‘hire’ a senior (who would be living off campus anyway) to sign up for the dorm you wanted and later fill out a room change request form to swap with you. You just had pay the senior $35 that he lost for backing out of his housing agreement (to live off campus)…and whatever compensation was negotiated. Not a lot of people were aware of the loophole though, so the going rate was quite low.
There seems to be quite a bit of apparently unethical conduct going on at NYU. Among other matters, plagiarism charges recently surfaced against one of their department chairs, after being discreetly ignored for fifteen years. See
http://www.nowpublic.com/world/plagiarism-and-dead-sea-scrolls-did-nyu-department-chairman-pilfer-chicago-historian-s-work
Just re-read the above, it should read that the part time students suffer the injustice, not the full time students.
“Free market class scheduling” is a little more justifiable for law schools that do not have part-time programs. Full-time students at schools with part-time students (who I assume have more going on than just law-school, on average) really suffer a process injustice and can be turned into second-class citizens at the school as they do not have an fair playing ground to compete, moreover, are likely unaware that the game is even played.