Preregistration for Spring 2026 (#1377)

Topics/tags: Registration, Grinnell, assorted data, long, rambly

Warning: As is the norm for the preregistration musings, this musing has not been edited or checked for accuracy.

The first stage of preregistration [1] for Spring 2026 just finished. It’s been fairly long since I’ve mused about prereg, so it seems like an opportune time to do so again. After all, I like to look at data. And, at times, it helps me be a better advisor. It may also tell me new things about Grinnell.

For those who don’t know Grinnell, Grinnell has an atypical registration system. Rather than, say, using a first-come, first served registration process or a staggered process [2], Grinnell lets students register for the classes they’d like to take without consideration of limits on class sizes. After that, there’s a process by which we cut classes back to their limits. After that, students who’ve been cut add new classes from what’s still available, often on a first-come, first-served basis.

Back when I started at Grinnell, the period after preliminary registration was called cut, close, and balance. You see, if a class had too many students, we’d see if there was another section of the same class that we could shift those students into, even if it met at another time or had a different instructor. We’d do that even if a class wasn’t over-enrolled; it generally makes more sense to have two classes of fifteen students than, say, a class of twenty-four and a class of six. However, a variety of factors led us to eliminate the balancing procedure. It required a lot of labor by the staff in the Registrar’s office. It meant that students might not end up with the instructor or time that they preferred. Some administrators thought the latter issue was unfair. As I’ve noted in the past, it was often a question of whether you prioritize group fairness or individual fairness.

These days, cutting is done using a priority system. For each class, departments set priorities. For example, it might prioritize students in certain majors or class years. Here’s the standard priority for upper-division computer science courses.

CSC: 4th, 3rd, 2nd (only prioritized for 1 CSC course per sem unless need <1 in grad sem)

Here’s a more complex structure for PHY-220, Electronics [7].

PHY 4th, 3rd, 2nd; BIO/CHM/BCM 4th, 3rd, 2nd; other 4th, 3rd

Here’s an even more complex (or at least longer) one for MAT-220, Differential Equations.

3rd taking w/ PHY 234, 2nd, 3rd MAT/PHY, 4th MAT, 1st, 3rd CHM/BIO/BCM/ENV, 4th, 3rd

Of course, most are much simpler. Such ANT-210, Illness, Healing, and Culture (ANT, 2nd, 3rd, 4th) or ANT-280, Theories of Culture, which reverses the list (ANT, 4th, 3rd, 2nd).

As I noted, we’ve just finished the first stage. That is, students have registered for classes. We’re about to move into the cutting stage. This provides an oppotune time to look at the preliminary choices students have made. That can be useful for scheduling classes in the future, for advising (It’s nice that you’d like to take Underwater Basket Weaving; unfortunately, past history suggests that about three times as many students preregister for the course as can take the course; let’s consider a fallback.), and perhaps to learn something about particularly popular faculty or courses.

I used to enjoy hypothesizing about whether all the preregistered students would be able to get certain classes and how students might ensure that. For example, I’d try to predict whether a department would choose to balance and whether the Dean would approve an extra section or lab. These days, I find such explorations less interesting, particularly since we’ve lost the balancing. Hence, I tend to focus more on things that catch my eye.

Here goes.

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I like to start with the most popular classes. Or at least the most heavily enrolled. And I suppose I mean sections rather than classes (or at least rather than courses) [8].

I had anticipated the Fernanda Eliott’s CSC-261, Artificial Intelligence, would be at the top of the list. Certainly, most of my advisees wanted to enroll. And there are a lot of CS majors. Plus, AI is a hot topic these days. While it has a large enrollment (37, with a capacity of 24), it’s relatively far down on the popular classes list.

At the top? Section 2 of STA-209, Applied Statistics, with 56 students preregistered. I think Collin Nolte, who is teaching that course, may have the highest number of students preregistered overall, with 56 in that, 45 in Section one of 209, and another 33 in STA-230, Data Science. It reminds me of the days in which President Osgood would announce the faculty who taught the most students in the graduating class, and Tom Moore would inevitably be one of them.

Although Collin’s class has the most preregistered students, it is not the most over-enrolled class. STA-209 permits 26 students, so that section is only over-enrolled by 30. In contrast, Christy Hazel’s MAT-215-02, Linear Algebra, has 54 enrolled and a cap of 20, making it over-enroled by 34 students. She didn’t quite reach the factor-of-three ratio of my fantasized UBW [9] course, but it’s close.

I suppose it’s worth imagining the CCB [10] process for each of these two classes, even if we no longer have such a process. Let’s see … there are 177 students preregistered for STA-209. There are six sections, each with a capacity of 26. That would permit 156 students. Amazingly, they could probably use another section.

Hmmm. My students often need 209. I wonder what the priority policies for that class are. Damn! It’s 2nd, 1st, 3rd, 4th. I suppose we should be encouraging our students to take that before they declare their CS major. Or perhaps we need to do some horse trading with Statistics to help each other with priorities.

What about Linear Algebra? There are 85 students preregistered and the four sections provide room for 80 of them. In the old days, we would likely have permitted the sections to over-enroll. I wonder what Math will do this year [11].

As long as we’re on courses from the former Department of Mathematics and Statistics (now the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Statistics), let’s see what other over-enrollment troubles they face. MAT-321-01, Foundations of Abstract Algebra, has 32 students preenrolled in a course that has a capacity of 20. Too bad for the non-math students who take Abstract for funsies! Or maybe Math will find a way to add a second section. For example, they could theoretically cut one of the sections of Calc II and still meet demand. That would free someone up to teach another section of 321.

MAT-220-01, Differential Equations, has 39 students and a cap of 28. I guess the Registrar’s office will get to implement the complex priority structure for that class [12].

STA-230, Introduction to Data Science, in over-enrolled by 21 seats between the two sections. One of those is Collin Nolte’s, with a cap of 18 and a preenrollment of 33. It would be nice to offer a third section. I don’t think Stats can cut anything to achieve that goal, so some complex back-room shenanigans would likely have to happen to handle the demand for 230 or 209.

In any case, I’m glad Stats was approved for an expansion position.

STA-310-01, Statistical Modeling, is also overenrolled. Fortunately, there seem to be enough slots in STA-310-02. That section is just in the less-pleasant time of TuTh 8:30-9:50 a.m.

Crap! STA-340-01, Baysian Statistics, has twenty-five students preenrolled and a capacity of twelve. I expect that all of those preenrolled students are Stats concentrators who need it for their concentration. And there’s not really another 300-level statistics class with space to push them into. There are five slots on STA-309, Design and Analysis of Experiments, but I believe that meets a different requirement for the concentration. (Sam pauses to check the requirements.) Nope. I’m wrong. STA-340 and STA-309 both meet the eight credits of advanced courses requirement. So I suppose the students can mostly be pushed to 309 and 310. It will just be tight.

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If you’re reading this and aren’t a faculty member, you’re probably asking yourself questions like Why don’t they just increase the capacity of the course? or Why don’t they just add another section? If you’re the parent of a student who is cut from one of these courses, or a student cut, you are almost certainly asking these questions.

I have answers. I’m not sure they’ll be satisfactory, but I have answers.

Why don’t we normally permit classes to over-enroll? When we over-enroll a class, we often have to change the pedagogy. Most frequently, that means that we have to move from active learning in the classroom to more lecture-based teaching. And that’s worse for students. The individual attention students receive is also likely to go down. After all, we have limited time in our days. A few extra students claming office-hour time may mean that others get no time. Adding students also increases our workload. We have more questions to answer, more work to grade, more people to keep track of.

We also encounter the slippery slope problem. If you’ll allow a course to over-enroll by one or two students, why not three or four? If three or four, why not five or six? It’s just a few more.

Unfortunately, there are also political reasons not to allow classes to over-enroll. If we handle the demand internally, administrators are less likely to understand our stress and pain. And that makes a difference when we ask for more faculty. We’re constantly overworked, with more demand than we can handle. I don’t see the problem; you seem to be accomodating all interested students. However, if we stick to our class capacities, we shift some of the pain elsewhere. Students (and their parents) complain not just to us, but also to administrators. And that gives those administrators incentive to help us better address the problem.

Students shouldn’t be pawns in a game between departments and the administration. Unfortunately, institutional behavior often leads things in that direction.

What about adding new sections? To add new sections, we need people to teach those sections. If we don’t cut a section elsewhere, it’s not clear where those people come from. Should a faculty member move from five classes per year to six? That will likely have extreme negative consequences on the attention they can give students, on their scholarship, and on their personal lives. Can’t we just find someone else to teach the classes? Unfortunately, Grinnell is a small town; there isn’t a large cadre of people who are qualified to teach courses, who want to teach courses, and can do the quality of teaching the Grinnell expects. If there is a cadre at all, it’s very small, and only qualified in a few subjects.

In addition, although Grinnell has an insanely large endowment, so much of our base budget comes from the endowment that it’s hard to come up with the money to add extra courses, or at least that’s what I hear. The Dean manages when they can and we can find extra people, but they hope to find other solutions.

As I’ve mentioned, one solution is to cut other courses. That only works in restricted circumstances. You can’t for example, cut a section of CSC-151 and magically switch a faculty member to teach STA-230. In some departments, perhaps most, you can’t even cut one upper-level course and switch that faculty member to another upper-level course. For example, you wouldn’t expect a faculty member whose expertise is in 19th-century American history to be able to teach a section of the popular Medieval history course.

Finally, as one of our Deans used to tell me, there are a host of other courses offered at Grinnell that are not over-enrolled. In most cases, students will benefit just as much (if not more) from those courses as they would benefit from the courses they’ve had to drop. And they can usually get their desired course in another semester.

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Where was I before I explored adding courses or capacity? Oh, that’s right. Some upper-level classes Stats classes are over-enrolled and there isn’t enough room for students to swap to other upper-level stats classes. I recall when CS felt like this, or perhaps even worse. Fortunately, we had a fallback: We would often restrict students to one CS course per semester (unless they needed more than one to make appropriate progress toward graduation). I don’t think Stats can invoke that approach; most Stats concentrators only take one Stats course per semester. I wish them luck.

Speaking of CS, let’s look at how we’re doing. It’s a mixed bag.

At the upper levels, things are fairly tight. I’ve already noted that AI has 37 students preregistered. Fernanda (or perhaps the department) was generous, and the capacity for that course is 24, so only thirteen students will need to find another course. Since AI is an elective, that course is not strictly necessary. Still, I’d prefer that we make sure that all students can take courses they want to take.

CSC-324-01, Software Design, is over-enrolled by fourteen students and CSC-324-02 is over-enrolled by three. I know that we generaly permit the class to grow a bit, so that may cover as many as eight or so of those seventeen. The remaining nine or more? There are six slots in CSC-301, Analysis of Algorithms [14]. There are nine slots in CSC-313, Advanced Operating Systems, but that’s an elective and has some additional prerequisites. There are also a bunch of slots in CSC-211, Computer Architecture.

At the other end of the curriculum, and the other end of the CS enrollment spectrum, we have CSC-151. We only have 28 students enrolled across three sections. Historically, it’s closer to 70. I expect that a variety of factors are at play. One is that the job path for a CS major has become much less clear. It used to be that CS provided a fairly straightforward path to a well-paying career. That’s no longer the case. Not all of our majors chose CS because of the career options, but some did. Certainly, many schools are seeing fairly significant decreases in the number of students declaring CS majors. Another is that we offered four sections, rather than three, in the fall. Hence, there isn’t a group of students who were cut. I believe the class of 2029 is a comparatively small class (421 students, compared to the nearly 1800 students enrolled at the College) and has about 20% fewer international students. The interactive development environment we use for the course has also had more problems than normal this semester, which may make the class seem less attractive. And, perhaps, students who wanted CSC-151 mostly to learn programming basics have decided that generative AI can do all they need. I hope they don’t believe that. They shouldn’t. But GenAI gets a lot of hype, particularly for doing basic programming tasks.

Oh well. Change happens.

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Back to the most popular (or at least most pre-enrolled) classes. Let’s see …

• 56 in STA-209-02, Applied Statistics. I told you that already.
• 54 in MAT-215-02, Linear Algebra. I told you that, too.
• 52 in STA-209-04, Applied Statistics, this time with Nathan Friedrichsen.
• 50 in CHM-129-03, General Chemistry w/Lab, with Elaine Marzluff. The three sections of GenChem have 7, 26, and 50, with a cap of 24. I expect that Chemistry will attempt to balance them out and, perhaps, incrase the capcity slightly. That will, of course, require that they add another lab section.

That’s it for classes with 50 or more. On to those with 40 or more.

• 49 in ECN-11-05, Introduction to Economics, with Brad Graham. The other four sections have 4, 5, 4, and 10. These can clearly be balanced, either explicitly or, more likely, by cutting from section 5 and letting students choose which to enroll in. I assume two factors are at play in this section having the highest enrollment: Brad Graham is teaching it, and he is the most senior of the folks teaching. In addition, it’s the only TuTh section.
• 45 in STA-209-01, Applied Statistics, with Collin Nolte. Did I mention that in my comments on Collin?
• 44 in PSY-248-01, Psychopathology and Clinical Science, with Chris Ralston. I don’t know what Psych does about that.
• 43 in ANT-260-01, Language, Culture, and Society, with Owen Kohl.
• 43 in PHE-100-05, Bowling, with Coach Jaws. Damn! I wanted to sit in on that class.
• 42 in ENG-227-01, American Literary Traditions I, with Steve Andrews.
• 41 in CHM-222-02, Organic Chemistry II w/Lab, with Andy Mobley.
• 41 in PHE-202-01, Coaching Methods, with Tim Hollibaugh. I’m pretty sure that PHE-202 always over-enrolls.
• 41 in PHI-121-01, Philosophy for Life, with Jennifer Dobe. I’m glad to see that Philosophy is becoming popular again.
• 41 in PHI-215-01, Existensialism, with Joe Neisser. It’s even popular at the 200 level!
• 40 in ECN-226-01, Economics of Innovation, with Brad Graham. As far as I know, this course is always popular.

Down to the thirties.

• 39 in BCM-262-01, Introduction to Biological Chemistry w/Lab, with Charvann Bailey.
• 39 in MAT-220-01, Differential Equations, with Ahmad Barhoumi. As I mentioned above (or below, because it’s in an endnote), it sounds like Math will be offering a second section.
• 37 in CSC-261-01, Artificial Intelligence, with Fernanda Eliott. I expected this to be more over-enrolled.
• 37 in ECN-235-01, Money and Banking, with Ahmad Barhoumi.
• 37 in LIN-114-01, Introduction to General Linguistics, with Eleanor Glewwe. Intro Linguistics is always popular. It also looks like we have only one section this semester. I wonder if Linguistics will find a way to steal someone from another department to teach a second section. Failing that, maybe the Dean will pay our normal adjunct to teach a second section.
• 37 in MUS-101-04, Grinnell Singers, with John Rommereim. I don’t think this is strictly over-enrolled, since Singers is a big group. It’s probably the first one we hit that’s not.
• 37 in PSY-314-01, Psychology of Collective Action, with Nadia Vossoughi. Huh. I didn’t realize that we had a regular course in that topic.
• 37 in SST-115-01, Introduction to Statistics. Whoops! I forgot this one when looking at Statistics since it’s listed in Social Science (SST) rather than Statistics (STA). The students taking this course likely need it for their majors and probably shouldn’t take 209. I wonder what the College will do. The politics of the course are complicated, so I think the Dean’s office is in charge.
• 36 in BIO-252-03, Organisms, Evolution, and Ecology w/lab, with Caroline Dong. There’s enough room in the other two section for the twelve or so students who will get cut.
• 35 in SMS-150-01, Introduction to Science, Medicine, Technology, and Society, with Gina Schlesselman-Tarango. It’s nice to see that SMS is popular. Tech Studies sometimes was also over-enrolled like this.

Okay, that’s far enough. I’m not going to do the twenty or so remaining courses with thirty or more people enrolled.

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What about the other end of the spectrum, the courses with very few students pre-enrolled? I generally try not to call those out, since many factors are at play. Low-enrolled classes remind me that I’m glad on I’m Dean, since it’s hard to figure out what to do, especially for Spring courses. In many cases, there aren’t other over-enrolled classes in the department, so you can’t just ask the faculty member to switch to a new section of those. And, even if there are other over-enrolled classes, they may not have the appropriate expertise to teach them. That’s also why you can’t naturally shift them to, say, Linguistics or Statistics.

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What other data should I look at? I sometimes look at Studio Art because so many of their courses over-enroll. For example, both sections of ART-134, Drawing, are over-enrolled. ART-240, Ceramics is over-enrolled, as is ART-242, Sculpture. I’m particularly worried that ART-310, Advanced Studio: Hybrid Media, is over-enrolled by six, since I think that course is required for all majors. Perhaps someday we’ll expand the Studio Art department.

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Looking around, I see that some classes are taking advantage of atypical offering times. Let’s see. There are five classes that are offered in the Monday, 7:00–9:50 pm slot: ENG-227-01, American Literary Traditions I [15], GDS-395-01, ST: Global Analysis, GRM-372-01, Creative Writing in German, HIS-351-01, History of a Book, and SST-125-01, Introduction to Geographic Information Systems. Strangely enough, Leif Brottem is teaching two of those (GDS-395 and SST-125). I assume that one is for the first half of the semester and one is the second half of the semester.

On that note, I suppose it’s okay to call out one of the under-enrolled classes. I was surprised to see that HIS-295-02, ST: Craft Histories, with Kelly Maynard, only had a few students enrolled. I’d expect that to be a course that many students would want to take. Then I saw that HIS-295-01, ST: Craft Histories, also with Kelly Maynard, is over-enrolled. And they meet at the same time! Waht’s the issue? Section 1 is in the first half of the semester and section 2 is in the second half. Since the workload in full-semester courses tends to increase toward the end of the semester, I can see preferring to take the course in the first half. Or maybe students just picked the first one they saw.

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As you might guess, I’m running out of steam. You probably are, too. I like to list the special topic courses. However, it’s better to do that before pre-registration, rather than after students have pre-registered. That way, I can suggest things to my advisees. I wish the Registrar still created the handout on special topics. In addition to some of the ones that got mentioned above, I’m interested in LAS-195-01, ST: SPAM: Us Empire in a Can, with John Petrus and Sharon Quinsaat and THD-295-01, ST: Musical Theatre History, with Karie Miller [16].

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See you next prereg!

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[1] Belinda has now officially termed it Preliminary Registration.

[2] Staggered processes often involve seniors registering first, then third-years [3], then second-years [4], and, finally, freshlings [5,6].

[3] Third-year students are juniors at most institutions. We don’t call third-year students juniors because, um, it implies being lesser. Something like that.

[4] Second-year students are sophomores at most institutions. We don’t call second-year students sophomores because the term is derogatory. Or perhaps it’s because more than the second-year class act sohpomoric.

[5] Freshling is my term for first-year student.

[6] Many institutions call first-year students Freshmen. That term is gendered.

[7] I’m puzzled why CS isn’t on that list. We may need to revisit some agreements with Physics.

[8] The difference between class and course confuses me.

[9] Underwater Basket Weaving.

[10] Cut, Close, and Balance.

[11] I had a chat with someone in Math. They are cutting from Prof. Hazel’s section but raising the capacity of each section to 22.

[12] The person in Math also told me that they are raising the cap on Calc-II to 32 and cutting two sections, which permits them to add sections of both Abstract Algebra and Differential Equations. Go Math!

[14] I always think the name is Algorithm Analysis. Then I remember that we’re a wordy department.

[15] Perhaps that’s one of the reasons it’s over-enrolled.

[16] I wonder if she’d let me sit in.

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Version 1.0 of 2025-11-14.