Registration Madness

As an academic adviser, April and November are busy months. That’s the season when students are registering for their next-semester classes. Over the years, the process has gotten increasingly stressful for first and second years students as their preferred course sections fill up before they can register. The system at my institution, like many others, gives priority registration to students who have more credits. This makes sense because juniors and seniors need to enroll in classes crucial to completing their major.

This, however, poses a difficulty for younger students intending to major in the sciences, where the major is organized hierarchically. In my department, which has a traditional curriculum (that works well), students intending to major in chemistry or biochemistry take general chemistry their first year, organic chemistry and analytical chemistry their second year, and diverge into either physical chemistry or biochemistry their third year. Chemistry majors take two semesters of P-Chem and one semester of Biochem. Biochemistry majors do the opposite. There are also associated upper division labs for each major. If a student does not get into organic chemistry in the second year, but only takes it in the third year, the fourth year looks particularly nasty schedule-wise.

A significant number of biology majors and other pre-med students, however, plan to take organic chemistry in their junior year. It’s not as crucial that they do so in their second year, where they are taking more foundational biology courses. Hence, they register into organic chemistry before students who really need to take it their sophomore year (as part of their major) can get in. The chemistry and biochemistry majors, on the other hand, cause problems to the physics and engineering students. Our majors typically take their year of physics straddling the sophomore and junior years, i.e., they register before the physics and engineering students who take this in their first and second years. This results in students being very stressed at registration time. They have all learned to “watch the numbers” every day as classes fill up so they can plan alternate schedules. This is not helped by the gossip network that results in a fishbowl effect driving students into a frenzy.

Why is this happening? As students increasingly want to major or minor in the sciences, resources do not always move as quickly in the same direction. Ten years ago, while our enrollments were not low, there would still be open slots for students. In an extensive lab-based curriculum, you cannot go beyond the “cap” both for safety and resource/equipment reasons. Twenty years ago, enrollments were lower still, and it was a pleasure perhaps a luxury to teach a smaller group of students and to get to know each one more personally. Today, our classes are stuffed to the gills. There are more waiting at the gate clamoring that more sections be open. But we have neither the space nor the manpower in some cases, although we try our best to make accommodations. In the old days, I never had to manage a waiting list. Now it happens on a very regular basis, except for more specialized upper division elective courses. I also feel that the learning experience, in some cases, has become suboptimal for the students – particularly in the math-laden physical chemistry class that I teach regularly where we try and get as many students in as need the class so that they graduate on time.

Could registration be done differently? Can class scheduling be done on demand? Should students be able to get into the classes they need and want most of the time? Is there a centralized way to do this more efficiently and with less stress for the students? In an unrealistic and perhaps idealized world, students would submit their course preferences and a complex algorithm would maximize scheduling times (to make sure there are no conflicts) and spaces. Resources will then be appropriately allocated, again taking into account a complex set of constraints. I can already envision many difficulties that will arise in the calculus. So maybe this is just a pipe dream for most institutions particularly as one scales up the problem in terms of system size and diversity.

I did this once on a small scale when working for a startup institution. While not officially in my job description, I essentially acted as the Registrar/Scheduler by putting together a plan for Year 2. I had to anticipate the slate of offerings that the first cohort of students would be taking as sophomores, while building in the schedule for the second cohort of first-year students. Since the system size was small, and the context was a residential liberal arts college, the constraints were considerably looser. I conceived a mock schedule based on core and major requirements, resources, and a host of other factors. Then I worked with capable I.T. folks who wrote a web-app where students indicated their preferences for courses (no times or instructor names were given, just the course titles and descriptions). When the data came in, I roped in some help to assemble a timetable that would work. We worked sort-of like manual computers as we divided up the data and pored over spreadsheets. I had devised an algorithm that each of us went through to find any schedule conflicts.

It actually worked, and is one of the things that I am proud of accomplishing! What helped considerably is that I had assembled a preliminary mock schedule based on student surveys and informal information put together from many conversations. I had carefully thought through the different permutations and potential problems before the data came in, and I was very fortunate that my forecasting turned out to be quite accurate for the most part. (There are always unanticipated issues that crop up but I had built in some flexibility and robustness to the plan.) But I learned one thing from my experience – it would be difficult to scale up this approach, so I set a task for the relevant faculty, staff and administrators, to plan something different for the next cycle as size, diversity and complex constraints increased. I was not there to see it take place, but students registered for their classes and life went on.

Here’s a picture in the midst of the planning process with a preliminary mock schedule on my whiteboard. Some of my students knew what I was working on and wanted to encourage me (hence, their colorful writing above the timetable). Looking back at it brightens my day!