Yiwei Sun: Class enrollment system should better account for substitute credit

Since summer, I have made phone calls, written emails and frequently commuted from my apartment to campus trying to enroll in Life Sciences 2: “Cells, Tissues, and Organs.” Signing up for a class shouldn’t be this difficult.

The cause is entirely procedural. At UCLA, many students like me have units earned outside – including from high school Advanced Placement classes. Though these classes are automatically evaluated to count toward our majors and are supposed to take care of prerequisites for our classes, they can lead to more trouble when they are used to satisfy course prerequisite requirements.

Often, credits from other institutions get evaluated as substitutes for UCLA course units and most departments on campus formally recognize these substitutions. Unfortunately, the Registrar’s Office does not recognize all of these courses.

This means that students often cannot enroll into various courses on MyUCLA because the Registrar’s Office doesn’t recognize certain courses, such as the ones I took for my A-level, the British school leaving qualification test, as equivalent to the original course, like Chemistry 20A: “Chemical Structure.” Yet the department does recognize them as fulfilling the necessary requirements. This arbitrary distinction puts many students at a huge disadvantage when it comes to getting classes.

To solve this, the Registrar’s Office should streamline the credit evaluation process to acknowledge substitute course credit on MyUCLA, and the relevant departments should over-enroll the students who can’t enroll manually by a fair amount to accommodate their needs. The office can work with the statistics department to come up with a reasonable enrollment model to predict the best over-enrollment amount. The Registrar’s Office should also work with computer science experts to improve its database to achieve this.

Students’ academic planning can be easily messed up because of an arbitrary difference in definition, although they are deemed the same by departments. While students are recommended by the office to request a departmental PTE number, departments like those under Life Sciences Core Education do not offer PTE numbers and students have to work out alternative ways to obtain a seat in life sciences classes.

Historical data show that many courses are not full toward the end of the quarter, as students drop classes later in the quarter. Even for highly competitive courses such as Life Sciences 2, data have shown that spaces open up later in the quarter. The physics department has been successfully controlling the overall enrollment by over-enrolling by 10 percent at the beginning of the quarter. Over-enrollment can compensate for the possible drops later in the quarter, after having analyzed historical enrollment data. Such a move would provide a fair avenue for students to enroll in these courses, instead of leaving their enrollment opportunities to luck.

For courses in high demand such as Life Sciences 2 that require Chemistry 20A as a prerequisite, students with Chemistry 20A credit obtained elsewhere face enormous disadvantage when they try to enroll in this course. No PTE number is offered by the department or professors. What’s worse, the spaces of Life Sciences 2 are normally taken up quickly during the first enrollment pass. It is basically impossible for such students to enroll later because any space that opens up is often taken up in less than a minute.

For students who have credit for Chemistry 20A that were obtained elsewhere, they are excluded from fair competition for spaces that have opened up and have to email the department when they notice open spots, thus subjecting their enrollment opportunity to the mercy of someone who does not share the same anxieties and need. As expected, most students receive a disappointing reply from the department. Logical deduction easily supports the claim that there is little chance of there being an open spot when the department officers process the email requests one by one. Emailing the department to process their enrollment manually becomes a placebo. Students are just striving for the last shot though they know the answer in their minds.

Courses such as Life Sciences 2 are extremely important for life science students who will need the credit for upper division courses. Some of them have to take the prerequisites all over again, defeating the purpose of evaluating prerequisite courses. Some of them have to take them in summer, when there are less enrollment restrictions, and spend extra money. Some have to wait a year or two until their academic standing is high enough for them to be able to email professors and departments to secure open spaces during their enrollment passes.

Enrollment is one of the most fundamental things we do at UCLA. It closely affects our UCLA life. In the midst of working around administrative red tape, we have long forgotten our rights to such basic things and have wasted too much time and energy. Let’s urge the Registrar’s Office to change and urge departments to change. After all, it is our education and we should assume the responsibility to better the administrative system.