Schlange Stehen

Ahh, registration season is here again. My favorite time of year…not! (Or as we used to say in Jr. High School: SIKE!) And this year, the wondrously wise powers that be have eliminated the waitlists.

So, here’s how it works: you fill out a course selection form, ranking the classes that you want in various categories. Then you turn it in to the Registrar’s office and wait. A week or so later, you get a paper in your mailbox telling you which classes you got into. In the old days, you would also have a list of the classes you tried to get, but didn’t (and were therefore waitlisted for).

In the old days, the next step was that you would go up to the Registrar’s office, where there were lists of courses with slots still open along with posted copies of the waitlists. You could look to see where on the waitlist you were and judge what your chances of getting a spot in the course might be. Then you filled out an add/drop form to drop any courses you’d changed your mind about (or maybe you got into two classes that conflict with each other) and remove your name from any waitlist you no longer wanted to be on, and add classes with open slots—or add your name to the waitlist for a closed course. As slots in a closed (waitlisted) course were dropped, the next person on the waitlist was automatically added to the course. At the end of each day, the Registrar would put little slips into the mailboxes of those who were added to courses from the waitlist telling them that they’d had good luck.

Nowadays… well, no one’s really sure what’s going to happen now. I am, for example, currently enrolled in 13 credit hours for the fall. Two two credit hour classes conflict with each other, so I’ll have to drop one, leaving me with 11 credit hours. I need at least 14 credit hours of classes, so I’ll need to add myself to a three credit hour course or two two credit hour courses. There are two three credit hour courses I wanted to take, but did not get into. In the past, I would have waited to see what happened with the waitlist. Now I’m not sure what to do. No lists of open courses have been posted, so I don’t know what my options are.

I foresee a huge issue when add/drop starts. People are going to be lined up at the Registrar’s Office all day every day, trying to get a spot in a certain class. One will have to make multiple trips trying to get a spot in the most popular classes, as you never know when someone might have just come by and dropped the class you want to take. I foresee lots of fighting and ill-will. I also foresee lots and lots of “grey market” practices. People are going to try and barter with their spots (“I’ll drop business organizations if you drop Secured Transactions”)—the only way to be certain that you will get a spot in a certain class is to be in line directly behind someone dropping that class. Given the level of immaturity demonstrated by the current 1L group as a whole (we are talking about people who defaced a collection box with pictures of professors on it during the public interest society fund-raiser—devil’s horns, pirate patch and all.), I also foresee a rise in “credit hoarding”, that is, people who register for classes that they have no intention of taking, but wants to have a stronger bargaining position come add/drop. Given that this is one of the reasons expressed by the administration for scrapping the old system, I find this particularly ironic in a very bitter way.

Anyway, I don’t know anyone signed up for the courses I wanted, so that option isn’t really open for me. And I don’t really relish the idea of lining up at the Registrar’s office multiple times a day, especially given the fact that I have class during the first hour that the office is open, so it’s not as though I can get there early, get a good spot in line, and be done with it. I’m also trying to decide if I should wait to drop the course that conflicts until I see if any of my friends want to take it or if I can “trade” it with someone else. Again, running contrary to the whole purpose of the changes. And just think: I’m not even particularly bloodthirsty in comparison to my other classmates and colleagues. If I’m considering playing this type of game, think about the rest of the student body. Most likely, my innate laziness will win and I’ll end up dropping it in the first day or two—whenever I see a particularly short line at the Registrar’s Office.

The system here was broken. But the current changes don’t seem to patch the cracks or mend the holes—it seems to me that the administration is trying to break the system even more. But then, most of what I’ve seen of the Administration would best be classified as “Not Student Oriented”.