O&B Home :The Section You Requested is Closed. Sucker.



I had always been the girl who thought the rules didn't apply to her. In high school, my friends and I had fake IDs, we forged passes to get out of school and made friends with the administration to get special treatment.

So the University of Florida's rigid registration machine caught me off guard. I ended my orientation by crying over useless classes, which included Man's Food and Geology. It didn't take long to learn that a pretty smile and a few tears get you nowhere in a school where 47,000 other students have the same sob stories.

Here, they ask for your number—not your name. I had to rethink my whole scheme.

At my job I met a guy who registered students for engineering. He offered to register me early, and did so for the next three semesters. But, when I began my junior year and tried to register myself, the only classes I could get were about as useful to a journalism major as aerobic swimming is to a med student. I waited in the packed advising office to complain to my adviser, who sent me away with a tough-luck talk.

Two days before classes started, I decided it wasn't worth the time, effort, or the money to go through with the semester. I told an administrator I’d be better off working as a waitress. No tears, no yelling. I calmly told him I simply would not go to school if this was the school I'd be going to. I got the classes I needed.

I got my way, as usual, but what about all the students who didn't? Should they have to hold a gun to their head to get an education?

Each semester the hunt begins anew. The prey: open seats. A mob of students scramble in cyber space, clicking section numbers into ISIS, celebrating at the small victory of a seat, and cursing at the red message of defeat. Disgruntled students overflow out the door of advising offices.

Despite the problems, the four-year graduation rate is up. Only 32 percent of freshmen who entered UF in 1993 graduated in four years. Last year the rate was 50 percent, according to a UF report. Much of the improvement is due to the implementation of ISIS and critical tracking, but those systems only promise students a seat in core classes, at whatever time the system chooses.

For students who want the choice electives and a perfect schedule, they have to get creative. That’s why an entire underground system of registration has emerged, far from the laws of ISIS.

In a sorority, it begins even before registration time. Senior girls announce empty spots in their schedule that are up for grabs for anyone who wants early dibs on a class. Girls planning to go abroad will fill their whole schedule for others. They’ll even share passwords, so they log on as each other, to sign up for classes for themselves.

"The actual process of having a friend drop a class seconds before you hit ‘Add’ is quite thrilling," says one freshman in a sorority. (She agreed to be identified, but Orange & Blue chose to withhold her name.)

"Then I realized that all of my friends, whether they were Greek or not, had someone holding at least one class for them. "I feel the only reason why girls have others hold classes for them is because 'everyone else does it' and they want to level the playing field," she says. "Outside Greek life, older girls in dorms and older siblings do the same thing. I guess it's just returning the favor."

Two students walk into the history office; both are looking for a spot in the same full class. As she’s done hundreds of times before, Linda Opper politely tells them the class is full, but they are welcome to put their names on the waiting list.

Opper, a secretary in the history department, has a blue tin on the corner of her desk, full of homemade chocolate chip cookies. They were a "thank you" for helping a student find an open seat. Throughout her career, there have also been many other gifts that say, "Please-please, just this once, sneak me in."

"I don't let people bribe me," she says. "Some students have even sent me flowers. It's really nice, but it doesn't help them any. In fact, one semester everyone in the office here thought I had a secret admirer because of all the flowers I got."

She sat down at 11:44 a.m on Nov. 4, to register for spring, her last semester at UF. She had her first choices of classes and backups, prepared weeks before. She tried her first choice. "The section you requested is CLOSED." Second, nope. Third, not offered.

"I was pissed, seriously pissed," says Beth Jacques, a communication sciences and disorders major. "I'm going to be paying $8,000 in out-of-state tuition a semester to take classes that aren't really what I need."

After three years of being on a waiting list for American Sign Language, she found that the course again was full. "It's really important for us to take that class, because we're dealing with the deaf and hard of hearing, but other people, in education and psychology, are interested in the course as well, and they take all the spots," she says.

Finally after talking to a T.A. who introduced her to the professor, he snuck her in the class. Sometimes it's not what your registration day is, but who can register you later. “It's just so frustrating," she says. "I can't understand what the problem is."

Ask Albert Matheny, and he'll tell you the problem: It's the students.

"You can't blame them for trying for the perfect schedule, but UF doesn't promise them that. We're committed to getting them the classes they need during the semester they need them to be on-track for their majors," says Matheny, the academic advising director for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

"It can't guarantee them the instructors they want in the time-frames they want on their first attempt to register, and that frustrates them initially. By the end of drop-add, nearly all students get the courses they need. That's all we can do as a university. And there are some things that students do during advance registration that exacerbate their own frustrations.”

For example, if you've ever held a class for a friend with a later registration date, if you've ever signed up for three classes knowing you will only keep one later, if you've ever taken classes in another major that you can't qualify for, you are part of the problem. The mess that is registration is the work of thousands of students trying to buck the system.

Matheny has seen everything from the hoarders to the closet majors to those who register for three classes in one major knowing they will only keep one.


“It gives students the artificial sense that the seats are full. That's not fair,” he says. “That's not cool.”

Then there's the closet majors. Their transcript says sociology, but they're signed up for 15 credits of criminology or business administration. They wait for their GPA to go up before they're accepted, Matheny says, and take seats away from people who are in those majors.

And some students withdraw from a semester just to keep their GPAs up. “That's the kind of thing that keeps you up at night. How do you stop students from doing that?” he says. “They'll withdraw from the whole semester just to avoid getting a B. They don't care, Bright Futures is paying for it.”

Every week, Matheny discusses these problems with the Enrollment Management Committee, a group of faculty dedicated to getting students the classes they need. During registration, the committee sits down with a 75-page weekly report on what's happening in registration. They know how many students want what classes, who can't get in and what's left.

UF has a policy of meeting demand in critical tracking courses and courses that are central to a major. That means that if the committee or a dean notices a critical class is in high demand, the provost will add seats. Since the initiation of tracking in 1996, the university has never had to deny a student a seat in a critical tracking course. However, they're not going to have much sympathy if you can't get into an elective.

Matheny says the current senior class is part of a wave of unexpected students who collectively sent the school into an overcrowding crisis. In the spring of 2000, the school admitted about 12,500 applicants, and expected about 6,000 to enroll.

But that’s the time when Bright Futures was starting to influence more students to stay in Florida, the Gators went to the NCAA final in basketball and tuition was skyrocketing at private and out-of-state public institutions. All that inspired 7,000 students to show up at UF in Summer B and Fall, and the administration had to scramble to get them classes.

The girl sat across from William McKeen, chair of the journalism department, pleading for a seat in a closed class. He stared back and told her there were no open seats.
“Well, how can we get another section offered?” she asked.

“You got $4,000 handy?” he said, referring to the price for a professor and materials.
"Just a minute.”

She took out her phone, called her father, and he offered to put up the money on the stipulation that his daughter get a seat in the class.

McKeen actually considered the offer.

“The last couple of years registration, enrollment and all that has been an ugly spectacle,” he says. “I wish we could just get people the classes they need. There's just no simple way of doing it. It's always a struggle. “People are always trying to bribe me with beer or food or something like that,” he says. “With this, I just thought, ‘This is really pathetic. ’This just shows how bad it is.”

Matheny says things are looking up. Now, they've taken steps to make their enrollment estimates more accurate, like early decision, requiring an admission deposit and using wait lists so they can accept students later if their yield falls short.

“Still,” Matheny says, “nothing’s going to get better until students start to trust the system.”

by Paulette Perhach, contributions by Gabrielle Bill