As the add/drop deadline approaches, College students are making a last-ditch attempt to push their way into popular or required courses via glitches in ISIS or a professors' good will.
"There does seem to be this general problem that we have more students than we have classes," Politics Prof. David Klein said.
Psychology Dept. Chair Timothy Wilson said his department also struggles with enrollment at the beginning of the semester.
"It's always a challenge for us, given how many majors we have," Wilson said. "I think we're okay for this semester -- it's taken a bit of management to make sure our majors have enough of the required courses they need to take."
Professors and graduate teaching assistants said they try their best to accommodate students working to complete major requirements or to enroll in a full course load.
"Both of my classes are over-enrolled," Klein said. "But sometimes there physically isn't enough space -- if we have people sitting on the floor, I think the registrar frowns on that."
Limited funding for teaching assistants also can restrict class sizes, Klein added. If too many students are enrolled in a lecture class, professors and teaching assistants can not grade papers thoroughly. In seminars, having too many students can hamper discussion.
While individual professors try to alleviate enrollment problems by allowing extra students in their classes, departments also work to make sure their majors get the courses they need. The politics department, among others, hired senior graduate students and part-time faculty to teach smaller classes. The French department added an extra section to a required upper-level class.
Still, many students said it is a difficult task to put together a satisfactory schedule with many people fighting for limited space in popular departments such as politics and foreign languages.
Fourth-year College student Andy Jenkins said he remained in only one of the classes he signed up for last semester, since he got none of his first choices during registration.
"The politics classes are just full on ISIS," Jenkins said. "If you want to get into any of them, they all require instructor permission -- scheduling this semester was very rough."
Instructors often restrict ISIS registration when their course is almost full so they can admit students from waiting lists. Waiting lists for many popular classes began last semester and list over 100 students.
Nevertheless, Associate College Dean Gordon Stewart said students generally end up happy with their schedules. The course offering directory frequently can be more intimidating than it is in reality because students wait until the last minute to drop classes they are not attending, he said.
"The numbers change from day to day," Stewart said. "Students have to be resourceful, they have to be persistent."
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