Most students will go to great lengths to avoid early-morning classes, but faced with a Ross School of Business policy that automatically assigns students to the program's required courses, Business School students have grown particularly crafty.

In order to avoid missing sleep for core courses like accounting and economics, some Business School undergraduates have resorted to bribing fellow students to swap for later class times.

"People have offered cookies to unconditional love to monetary compensation for switching classes," Business School junior John Lu said. "The funniest is when people are honest and they tell you straight up that they don't want to wake up at 8:30 a.m."

A newsletter sent to students last week warned students that accepting a bribe or spamming students to swap a class could be considered a violation of the school's code of conduct.

Evonne Plantinga, senior associate director of financial aid and academic services for the Business School, said the school pre-registers Business School undergraduates to ensure the classes are comprised of a mix of students of different ethnicities, genders and nationalities.

Plantinga said that when the school switched from a two-year program to a three-year program in 2006, addressing each student's individual scheduling concerns became more difficult for the school's academic services officers. Last year, the school began allowing students to swap classes with each other through CTools to help facilitate the process. From the Fall 2007 term to the Winter 2008 term, more than 800 swaps were processed.

Before CTools, students could only modify their core course schedule if they qualified for one of five exceptions: if they had a documented health issue, were a student athlete, had documentation from a religious leader or organization, were working on a dual degree or had declared an academic minor through LSA.

Although the school has tried to regulate the system, students say it still has some kinks. "The biggest problem is that people with 8:30 (a.m.) classes try and get out of it by spamming your inbox," Lu said.

In order to find people to swap with, some students have abused iMpact, a password-protected network for Business School students, faculty and staff. Students can use the network to send a mass e-mail to the entire Business School community, but doing so is considered a "misuse of a University resource," Plantinga said.

Business School junior Jamie Epstein said she has found the mass e-mails bothersome, but thought they seemed more effective than using the CTools site. She estimated that half the emails she received about switching core courses were from students trying to get out of an 8:30 class.

"Although the spamming can become overwhelming, annoying and unnecessary, if you want to read it, you read it, if you want to delete it, you delete it," Epstein said.

She also said there are difficulties with using the CTools browser, because student responses are not typically in chronological order. Sometimes, old posts from students who may have already found a swap partner can linger for days.

To remedy that problem, Business School officials have asked students to delete outdated posts in the newsletter.

"It gets chaotic," Plantinga said. "If we could get students to do self clean-up, then that might help the clutter of threads."

Because Academic Services can't guarantee that everyone will find a swap partner, some students assigned to the 8:30 a.m. class aren't able to find a way out. Some feel that having an early morning class hurts their chances of earning a good grade.

"I had two accounting classes at 8:30 in the morning last year, and I felt it was a barrier in my learning," Business School junior Mike Spadafore said. "That is kind of frustrating because those are classes that are tough to learn already and tough to really absorb."

Spadafore said that he knows there are students out there who like waking up early in the morning. He said the students who like to wake up early in the morning should be assigned the classes instead of people who struggle to function that early.

"I was forced to take Accounting 272 at 8:30 and I could not concentrate - I just didn't want to be there," Epstein said. "I wanted to learn but I couldn't concentrate at that time in the morning."

Business School sophomore Steve Babinec said he didn't mind having an 8:30 a.m. class, but said most students aren't as alert in morning classes.

"When you talk about B-school competitiveness and grades, having an 8:30 a.m. (class), you're at a disadvantage," he said.

While some students remain disgruntled, some say getting up early is practice for the future.