Enrollment needs some restrictions
It seems like every year the Daily Bruin publishes a complaint about students’ difficulties registering for classes.
For example, an editorial (“Enrollment restrictions should help, not harm,” Feb. 28) claimed that “priority enrollment” and “enrollment restrictions by major” are the latest cause of all our registration problems.
The authors remain ignorant of any procedures currently in place to counteract these measures and are closed to the idea that there might actually be reasons for these so-called problems.
Every quarter I have attended UCLA there has been a cap on the number of slots in each class available during the priority-registration period. Therefore, priority enrollment does not fill a class before others have a chance to enroll.
Each priority group has a specific reason for their priority: Not only do athletes and disabled students need to work around a specific time slot, but students in General Education Clusters must avoid scheduling conflicts with their cluster.
The university also invests a large amount of effort (Academic Advancement Program, UCLA Honors Program) and money (Alumni and Regents scholars) on other priority groups.
Most of the majors that restrict enrollment are gigantic ones that are rightfully concerned with getting “entire swathes of students” through the major.
It is an unfortunate side effect of attending a large university that students in smaller, interdisciplinary majors are not afforded the same “benefits” as those in larger majors such as history and psychology.
However, students who need a particular course to fulfill major or minor requirements would be much better served by working with departmental counselors and the course professor to obtain a PTE number rather than whining about it in the newspaper.
Dwight Wynne, Fourth-year, cybernetics