At the largest university in Canada, you can’t always get what you want.
Noaman Ali, the incoming president of the Arts and Science Student Union (ASSU), was “amused” to find a flyer posted in 2005, offering $100 for a spot in a make-or-break psychology class.
Other students have remarked that they have seen similar flyers posted around Robarts and Sid Smith in the past year, all offering monetary rewards in exchange for hard-to-get spots in popular or mandatory classes. Ali said he has heard of other methods, too.
“A friend of mine was telling me that he couldn’t get into the courses he wanted, so he tried to get into courses that he knew that others would want so that he could perhaps pull off a trade.”
And there are rumours of computer science students programming detailed macros into their laptops, so that they can log on to ROSI, the online course selection system, 100 times a day without having to be physically present for the torturous task.
Maybe you’ve agreed to sign up for a class that a friend with a lousy start time couldn’t nab. Maybe you’ve even signed up for a false major or minor, grabbed a class you couldn’t obtain otherwise, and then dropped your new major like it was hot. The fact is that as the Faculty of Arts and Science relies increasingly on ROSI, students are finding more ways to cheat the automated system.
Course enrollment at Canada’s largest university has never been easy. At last count, over 27,000 full-time students were trying to find their way into over 4,000 sections, in over 200 specified programs in the Faculty of Arts and Science alone. With enrolment spiking by about 1.5 per cent, too many students are scrambling for too few spots.
Richard Chow, associate registrar of registration and enrolment, recalls that when ROSI was first installed, sans start times, the entire student population would try to log in at once, resulting in dramatic system crashes. Even after automated start times were set in place for students in specific years of study and academic streams, ROSI still had problems.
Students would log in many times a day trying to get into a desired course, with the result being system sluggishness and freezes that Ali called “a pain in the ass to deal with.”
To alleviate some of the congestion, a new feature was launched for this year’s round of enrolment: waitlists. The waitlist system was developed after reading responses on course selection in the March 2006 Arts and Science survey. The often candid and frustrated comments on their course enrolment experience, especially from upper year students, struck a chord with the faculty registrar.
A student experience committee was created to work with the Student Web Service in developing the new waitlist system. Now, Chow explains, instead of checking to see if you’ve gotten into a desired class, you will simply be entered on to the waitlist system if you have priority. If someone decides to drop the class, you move up on the list. The best part is that students can actually see their rank, “so that what is presented to you, applies to you,” Chow notes.
As of July 18, 5,000 students had already been enrolled on a waitlist for spots in 70,000 spaces of lecture enrolments. Chow estimated that one in 14 students are registered for a spot in a class they may or may not obtain. “Idealistically, there should be no waitlists because everyone gets what they want…but there are options for students other than that course,” he said.
Some students have lodged complaints about the system. Andrew Jevan, a fourth-year philosophy student writes in an open email to the Faculty of Arts and Science, “The way the new system is designed, students who want to secure a full set of five courses will no longer have the opportunity to improve their selections because they will not be eligible for the waiting lists. On the other hand, students who sit on waiting lists risk not being able to take a full course load.”
A good case in point is the current waitlist for PHL388H1, a third year seminar on literature and philosophy, with token hot prof Mark Kingwell. At last count there were 38 spots in the class, 60 students on the waitlist. Chow reveals that in some cases, departments don’t like to publish who will be teaching the class in the timetable listings, for fear that whoever the professor is will sway course enrolment too dramatically.
But what about the student who just plain really, really wants the class? “Some of these things we can’t change,” said Chow. “And if someone asked, “Can we change?” we might just say, ‘we cannot’,”
