Next week, instead of camping out for basketball seats at Pauley Pavilion, many of us will be staring at our computer screens, ready to pounce on the next available seat as the minutes tick down to our enrollment appointment times.
But amid the plethora of classes available to enroll in during scheduling week, there are a few golden-nugget courses that only the lucky few are able to attain.
Occupying some of the top spots in this elusive list of much-sought-after classes are the infamous lower division political science courses.
It’s long past time the political science department rethinks the way it organizes enrollment in these five crucial classes. My advice? One word: restrictions.
Most likely, if you’ve ever tried to get into Political Science 10 through 50 without a priority pass or senior standing, you’ve experienced the endless frustration of finding the classes and the waitlists completely filled quarter after quarter.
Lower division political science courses are some of the most difficult classes to enroll in at UCLA. Many students see them routinely filled up just a day after first-pass scheduling begins. For political science students watching at our computers at home, it’s immensely discouraging to see seats slipping through our fingers every time we hit the refresh button.
Leah Halvorson is a political science graduate student who has been a teaching assistant in both Political Science 10 and 20. She said that her students have encountered issues while scheduling their classes.
“I’ve had fourth-year political science majors who haven’t been able to get certain lower division classes,” Halvorson said, “and I really feel for them because it flips their coursework so they’re taking upper division classes before their lower division coursework is finished.”
Halvorson argued that “having experience in a lower division class gives you a chance to survey methods or approaches that give you a really good groundwork for your upper division classes.”
Unfortunately, for the 2,200 students with political science majors, pre-majors and minors currently at UCLA, getting these lower division classes in a timely manner is nearly impossible.
Class size is just one reason why enrollment can prove so difficult. Demand often exceeds availability. Yet there is a measure of control that individual professors can use to help counter this reality. According to James Bondurant, an undergraduate adviser for the political science department, faculty members can choose to either accept the minimum enrollment for a large class (typically about 60 students) or they can opt to take on more students.
“There are some faculty that are real team players, that are willing to pitch in,” Bondurant said, “and they’ll teach 100 or 150, and we’re grateful for that.”
Physical room size can restrict enrollment capacity for classes of more than a few hundred, and hiring additional teaching assistants can be a stretch for the department budget. But where there is a will there is a way, and for political science students, there is definitely a will to make these classes larger.
Yet another problem lies in the logistics of class enrollment restrictions (or lack thereof). Currently, there aren’t any restrictions on lower-level political science classes, both because they are applicable to General Education requirements and because students working toward declaring their political science pre-major need to take two lower division courses in order to make their pre-major standing official.
Here’s what I propose to help counter these issues:
Professors should be urged to take on as many students as possible in these high-demand classes. A little extra love from the professors, and perhaps some clever budget adjustments within the political science department, would help ensure that seats are available to students with later enrollment appointment times.
Next, and most importantly, first-pass enrollment restrictions should be placed on the lower division courses. These restrictions would allow only students with political science majors, pre-majors and minors to enroll in the classes during first pass, ensuring availability to the students who absolutely need to take the courses.
How can you do that when you need to complete two courses to even declare as a pre-major? By allowing students to declare as a pre-major without any course requirements. The effort required to declare the pre-major could filter out students interested in other fields or those not dedicated enough to commit to the political science track.
And if the department really wants to keep GE classes available to all students, perhaps it should consider rotating restrictions so that one lower division class per quarter would remain unrestricted to allow access to a broader spectrum of students.
The fact remains that political science students are frequently denied access to the very classes that are necessary to progress in their major. It’s time the department put some effort into looking out for its own instead of allowing students with political science majors, pre-majors and minors to battle it out for classes they all have to take.
If you’re fed up with watching political science classes fill up before your very eyes, e-mail Fitzpatrick at cfitzpatrick@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.