donn@sdchema.UUCP (04/29/84)
I graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz campus (also known as Uncle Charlie's Summer Camp, well known for its redwoods and its population of bright yellow shell-less terrestrial gastropods). I'm surprised none of the other UCSC alumni on the net (there are several) have spoken up to explain why class registration doesn't have to recapitulate the battle for Stalingrad every quarter. I was never bumped from a class while I was at UCSC. I never had to pre-register for a class. I almost never had to wait in line. The procedure for class registration was simple. The first week of classes, you got some computer punch cards from the college office. You then went to every class you thought you might want to get into; if the class sounded like what you wanted, you filled in the blank lines on the punch cards. At the end of the week you turned the punch cards in to the college office, which would hand them over to the registrar, where they would be punched and entered in the computerized class list. That was all there was to it, with only a few exceptions which I managed never to bump into. UCSD is similar, but cards are validated while-U-wait at the registrar instead of dumped at the college, and there is considerable pre-registration. Sometimes a class would be unexpectedly large or small. In the case of small classes professors could arrange to have the class fold, or they could just have fun being able to spend less work than expected on the class and give more attention to individual students. (I don't know to what extent this was policy -- it was simply the observed behavior.) In the case of large classes professors sometimes just moved the class to a larger room (or outdoors, if the weather was good and the class was amenable), and sometimes they put pressure to leave on students who weren't as serious as the others. (Sometimes the professor merely undertook to make life unbearable for students who couldn't spend every waking hour doing work for a class... I had one computer class which was weeded down from 70-odd to 36 in this fashion, and the pressure was suicidal. In fact, there was at least one suicide while I was there, fairly spectacular too -- a student was found hung from a tree on the back forty. This pressure was equally ghastly on readers; I remember marking weekly assignments with more than 40 tough problems in a computer class of 20 or so, and wondering if I could catch the next flight to Havana... Some of this was brought on by myself, since I was foolishly attempting to accomplish a double major.) At any rate complicated and stressful registration procedures are NOT necessary, at least at havens of anarchy like UCSC. (I understand that things have gone downhill at UCSC since I graduated, though -- for example, grades were reintroduced! Tell me it's not true...) Donn Seeley UCSD Chemistry Dept. ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn PS to UCSC graduates -- if I misremember any of UCSC's procedures (hey, it's been almost 4 years) -- forgive me, and correct me.