As winter quarter begins, students are confronted, once again, with the “shopping period.”

During this period, most students are looking for information about potentially interesting courses. They want to know whether the Nobel Prize-winning professor is also a public speaker, whether that 4:15 p.m. class is interactive enough to prevent uncontrollable napping, or whether a $150 “required” book will just end up collecting dust.

In a perfect world, students would be able to attend an array of courses during this period at the beginning of each quarter. Naturally, classes conflict, forcing students to attend parts of lectures or to miss some classes in order to test out others. After a week of assessing professors, weighing assignments and crafting a workable schedule, students could then commit to their optimal schedule and begin the quarter.

If only this were the case. Instead, many professors choose to start post-introductory material on the first day of class. Attendance thus becomes a must, and joining a class a day or two late means immediately falling behind. Since many humanities courses are not recorded, students can’t catch up on lecture material unless they happen to know a friend in the class.

How can a student decide between two classes that take place at the same time without being punished? Stanford is a liberal arts university with an intellectually curious student body — it is unfair to penalize those with a broad range of interests for exhibiting those characteristics which make them outstanding students in the first place.

The faculty, though, is not to blame for attempting to fit in subject material at the onset of the quarter. Many professors try to squeeze a semester’s worth of material into 10 weeks, compounding the often frenzied pace of the quarter system. The quarter system itself is a large part of the problem. Short of reverting back to the semester system, there is not much wiggle room in the schedule to permit an honest-to-goodness shopping period without overloading subsequent lectures with extra material.

Since the shopping period, like Dead Week, stands more in name than in reality, many students already use alternative methods to learn about possible classes. Some spam lists asking previously enrolled students to expound upon their experiences. Others rely on teachers’ reputations — or even departments’ reputations — to make rough estimates.

If the possibility of a true shopping period is unattainable, however, a few technological tools could serve as a sufficient alternative to skipping classes, running late to others, and relying on word of mouth. Instead, all professors could be required to post their syllabi one week before the start of the quarter, allowing students to get a sense of what the class will cover. (Stanford Syllabus [syllabus.stanford.edu] was an attempt to allow students to access syllabi before classes, but not enough instructors upload their syllabi for the system to be effective.) The posted syllabi should include the required textbooks for the course, which could dissuade or persuade students to take the class, and would also allow students to plan their expensive book purchases ahead of time.

In addition to syllabi, a previous lecture of each course should be readily available, so students can get an idea of a professor’s teaching style, which can often have as large an impact on a course as the subject material itself. If the course is being taught for the first time, one of the professor’s previous lectures could be uploaded, along with a lecture from a similar course. Or, if the course changed lecturers, a clip of a lecture by the new professor along with a clip of a previous class lecture could be uploaded. Since most courses in the humanities are not recorded, a University initiative would be needed in order to gather the data. Although perhaps costly, such assistance from the administration would allow a generally improved fit between students and the classes they choose.

The new CourseRank Web site (courserank.stanford.edu), initiated by students and backed by the administration, could potentially house this new course information. With its easy-to-use course directory system, syllabi and lecture recordings could be directly uploaded to each course page. CourseRank could become a one-stop-shop for students to research classes, schedule enrollment for the upcoming quarter, and provide feedback on courses to assist those in the future.

Without a proper shopping period, students are left to settle for second, third or even fourth choice classes. It should be the responsibility of the University to help students in this matter, by mandating faculty to provide students with the crucial knowledge they need to make informed decisions. Syllabi and sample lectures at hand, students could walk into class on the first day confident in their class schedule. This reduction of stress in the quarter system would surely be welcomed.