For the type of example you're describing, i would suspect setting omitNorms="true" for your courses field would make the most sense -- that way both of your example docs would score the same. I don't see a lot of value in having norms for a short multivalued field like that.
Alternately: you could write a custom similarity impl that actually creates a higher norm the "longer" the field is -- that way courses with more "names" are actually given "extra credit" ... which may make sense from your viewpoint if you assume courses with lots of variant names are more important. it all depends on what you want to see happen (your original email said #2 scored higher then #1 and asked how to avoid it, you didn't say what ideal result you were hoping for.) -Hoss
