Unless you’re a first-year student or you have a scholarship, course registration can be a disappointing experience.
As a third-year student, one of the problems I’ve faced in the past two years of registration is encountering courses which fill up before my time-ticket is available. I understand that some courses are going to fill up faster than others, but it’s a major issue for students forced to register on the last possible day due to their student number.
Building a backup timetable is certainly the smart thing to do in case some of your planned courses fill up before you get a chance to register. Some courses are also available at several different times during the week, so there’s a chance at least one of those times will be free, right? Well, not exactly.
My registration opened at 2 p.m. this year on one of the later days. The last time slot available for the one of the courses I wanted was still open at 1:57 p.m. Three minutes later, when my time-ticket opened, it was unavailable. This was difficult news to accept after having something similar happen to me the year before.
I can understand this is just going to happen. There are only so many courses, and they’re going to get filled one way or another. First-year students also rightly deserve to register early for first-year courses. Unfortunately, somebody has to be at the bottom of the list in terms of student number. But does your registration time-ticket really have to depend on your student number every year?
If a student number forces someone to wait until the last day of registration one year, it shouldn’t for the following three years of their degree. It just doesn’t make sense to screw some people over on a yearly basis, while others get a clear advantage every year for no reason other than a number assigned to them.
I would suggest adding a few more time slots to courses that are anticipated to fill up fast based on past years, but I don’t believe this would fix the problem completely. The Economist reported in May that universities are taking on more students than ever before. The university enrolment rate in the past two decades has more than doubled, according to the article. So adding more courses might be a temporary solution, but more students coming into university likely means more empty spaces will just get filled in the future anyway.
So here’s one solution to the registration issue: if you’re going to decide when someone is allowed to register for their courses, change the pattern on a yearly basis. Don’t stick to the same order for every registration period, because it’s only going to put the same people at a disadvantage simply because of their student number.
If your student ID ends anywhere between 97 and 99, sure, allow those people to register on one of the early time-ticket days this year. But next year, give the students whose ID numbers end in 00 to 03 that spot to make it fair. Nobody likes being picked last, especially when it means you’re stuck with the schedule you had to settle for, and not the one you actually wanted.
