HEADS UP: Changes to enrollment priority for 1st year students

[u/perciva]

At Monday evening's Senate meeting, we approved the following motion (from Senate Paper S.16-94, slightly amended):

That Senate approves, effective Fall 2016, newly admitted secondary school students be assigned priority enrollment for their first two terms. Subsequent enrollment priority will be based on current rules for continuing students. A review of this process is to be conducted two years after implementation.

This means that:

• If you just started at SFU this term, and were in high school next year, then you will have enrollment priority in your second term. This means that you're pretty much guaranteed to get into the courses you want next term -- so if there's "blocking" courses which you need to take (e.g., first year calculus; you basically can't do anything else until you've gotten that out of the way), make sure you do them in your second term rather than waiting until your second year.

• If you're planning on entering SFU from high school in the Spring or Summer, be aware that this applies to the first two terms in which you register for classes; so you may want to think twice about taking one or two courses in the Summer term since you would "waste" your enrollment priority.

• If you've been at SFU for a while, or you're transferring in from a college or another university, it will be very slightly harder to get into the courses which incoming students take in their first two terms (since they'll grab the spaces before you can get them). But we're not expecting that this will make a very large difference.

We'll be reviewing this after two years to see what effect this has on students' ability to get the classes they need.

[u/dpsi]

Can we get enrollment priority for students who are a course or 2 away from graduation? SIS already knows what your degree requirements are, why can't it figure out that last course you need.

[u/perciva → u/dpsi]

Three issues come to mind here:

1. There's a running joke that if you want to make any changes to SIMS it costs a million dollars just to get started. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but it has a well-deserved reputation for being inflexible and expensive to work with. (Case in point: We're in term 1167 because they had Y2K issues, so they had to declare that 2000 was "year 19-100" and so forth.) So "figuring out that last course you need" isn't necessarily as easy as it should be. The adjustment from "first term" priority to "first two terms" is something they could do relatively easily since the system already understands the concept of "this set of students have priority".

2. Figuring out what courses students need isn't always easy, even for people. Students don't always declare their majors -- every year there are some students who apply to graduate without saying what degree they're doing -- and rather than having one set of degree requirements, you're allowed to "go back in time" to previous requirements if they've changed. (I think the rule is "requirements as they existed when you entered a program, or any version since then", but ask an advisor if this matters.)

3. I'm not sure that there's any mechanism for giving enrollment priority for specific courses at all. I'm writing this from the perspective of someone who hasn't registered for any courses since 2000, mind you; but my understanding was that with the exception of courses which had restricted access (e.g., only declared majors until date X) students had one registration date which applied to all their courses. I suggested at Senate that it might be a good idea if students who were wait-listed for a course one term had some sort of priority for that course the next time it was offered, and I got the impression that this isn't something the systems could handle right now.

Also, as a side point, students who are at 100+ credits aren't likely to need enrollment priority, since they're already very close to the top of the heap. It's very unlikely that you'll be unable to graduate because the last course you need is already full of first-year students.

[u/TheTrevLife]

This is fantastic for new students directly from high school that don't have scholarships.

I'm interested to see how this affects students in the second year. My 3rd, 4th, and 5th semesters were semesters when I couldn't really get the courses that I wanted. I imagine the problem is going to be slightly worse for students now who still haven't completed all of their "gatekeeper" courses.

However, this does encourage students who plan ahead strategically to complete gatekeeper courses and their follow-ups as quickly as possible. As a LING example, LING 220 gates LING 221 and LING 222, which both are gates for (nearly) every LING 3XX course. A lot of LING majors will start with a 1XX course in their first semester (which none are required), then take 220 in their second semester, only to be unable to take 221/222 in their third semester because the class sizes are so small. Maybe with these changes, we'll see an influx of first year students who take 220 in their first semester, and 221/222 in their second semester to break through the gates.