Waitlist policies vary by course

Molecular biology professor Lee Silver, who teaches the course, said in an e-mail that the rise of electronic enrollment has largely eliminated the use of waiting lists.

“Since SCORE became the mechanism for signing into courses, the waiting list has become mostly irrelevant for a course like mine, which doesn’t have an application process,” Silver explained. “When a student drops my course, the course becomes immediately open, allowing anyone on SCORE at the time to sign up, which instantly closes the course again.”

For students locked out of popular courses, their enrollment prospects are determined at the discretion of individual professors — one of the few areas of academic life not regulated by official University policy.

Silver and several other professors noted that they can decide whether or not to have a waiting list, the size of the list and the order in which students are taken off the list and enrolled in the course.

“I keep a waiting list for my classes because you always get people who drop out,” said anthropology professor Alan Mann, who teaches popular classes like ANT 206: Human Evolution and ANT 215: Human Adaptation. “I like giving students who are interested in the course the opportunity to enroll,” he added.

Similarly, English professor William Gleason is keeping a waiting list — at 58 students as of Tuesday afternoon — for ENG 335: Children’s Literature, one of the University’s most popular courses this spring.

“I decided to keep a list for this course because so many students who wanted to enroll were unable to do so when the course was capped,” he said in an e-mail.

Silver said he maintains a short waiting list, but rarely uses it, noting that his class has been “heavily oversubscribed” every year since its creation in 1999.

“Waiting lists were important for my course in the pre-SCORE days, before 2003,” he explained.

Mann said he typically sees waiting lists of 30 or more students, with only four or five eventually making it off the list and enrolling in the course.

For those students who make it off the waitlist, the announcement is a welcome relief.

Peter Favaloro ’12, who failed to successfully enroll in his first-choice philosophy course, was forced to enroll in another class, though he stayed on his desired course’s waiting list.

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“I decided I would stay on the waiting list [for the philosophy course] and show up to all the lectures until a slot opened up,” he said.

Within hours of classes beginning on Monday morning, a slot opened up in the course and Favaloro quickly enrolled.

By contrast, Nathaniel Gardenswartz ’12, who initially wanted to enroll in WWS 452: Special Topics in Public Affairs: Inequalities — a course usually restricted to upperclassmen — chose not to remain on the waiting list, though the professor invited him to attend the first meeting.

“I have my doubts as to whether enough students will drop out [of] the course to allow all the wait-listed students who attend the first meeting to enroll in it,” Gardenswartz said in an e-mail. But, because of the wide variety of courses offered at the University, Gardenswartz said, he is not “any less happy about the courses I am taking this semester.”

For Favaloro, remaining on the waiting list was the right choice.

“I’m lucky that my strategy paid off, because if it hadn’t, I would have had to take the other course having missed the first few lectures,” he said.

“Not only that, I’m lucky it paid off quickly, because there are readings due tomorrow that I wouldn’t have been able to access through E-Reserves if I hadn’t made it off the waiting list,” Favaloro added.

Professors use a variety of methods to decide the order in which students are let off the waiting list. While Gleason ranks students based strictly on the date they requested to be placed on the list, Mann organizes his list “rather flexibly, depending on what is necessary.”

“I teach two courses that satisfy distribution requirements,” Mann explained. “Seniors who need the class to graduate or are majoring in anthropology are going to get priority over other students.”

Some professors, like Mann, have experimented with increased class sizes as a way to decrease waiting lists and give more students the opportunity to enroll, but have only had negative experiences.

“I did it last year when I doubled the class size of Human Evolution, but it was not successful,” Mann said. “It was hard to get to know people, and I felt that something essential in teaching was lost.”

While waiting lists appear to be the only option for students locked out of courses, some believe the current system could be reformed.

Favaloro, for example, said he thought students should have more time to decide whether to remain on a waiting list or to pursue another class.

“I think the best system would involve a shopping period similar to Yale’s, so students could spend the first few weeks of classes figuring out what they want to take without worrying that they’re missing important class time,” he said.