Gone are the days of students anxiously waiting for professors to wrap up their introductions, to plead their case for why they should be the lucky soul given an extra seat available in class.
Starting this semester, Long Beach State is implementing a new policy in which late registration is now purely online, as opposed to previous semesters where any student sitting in on a class had the possibility of receiving an add code at the professor’s discretion.
Students must now log into their myCSULB account and add the class if it is open. If a space is listed as available and two students attempt to enroll, the professor will have no say in which person gets the seat. Whoever finishes the enrollment process online first will get a spot in the class.
The policy has received reviews on both ends of the spectrum from students and faculty.
“That’s dumb,” said Eva Grello, graduate art student. “There should be flexibility…it should be at the teacher’s discretion.”
Alexis Wolfe, a junior English major, also criticized the new system, arguing that a student who makes an effort to show up to a waitlisted class should have priority over another who sees the open spot online.
Having multiple students attempting to join a class with limited availability would force professors to choose who gets into the class.
“We used to have a big, big problem,” said journalism and public relations professor and academic advisor, Danny Paskin. “That day one or week one we would have a line of students outside of the door.”
Paskin said he is in favor of the new system for its practicality of choosing students on a first come, first serve basis.
“I would say yes to all [students], but the three fastest ones…will get the spot, and it was just basically unfair to everybody,” Paskin said. “It was always tricky to figure out who’s number one, who’s number two…there’s no way.”
With this change, professors are hoping to have an easier go at the first rush of students trying to sneak into those last few spots. While some professors are enjoying the benefits of attempting to control the week one chaos, others haven’t even had a run in with the new system yet.
“I didn’t know it was different actually,” said graphic design professor Anthony Bever.
If the goal was to make registration during the semester’s first two weeks less of a hassle for all parties, Paskin said he believes LBSU is headed in the right direction.
“It created this problem of basically [having to] choose,” Paskin said. “In the end it became pretty much bingo for the students.”