<ol>
<li>Bearfacts is updated once a day at roughly 8AM. Telebears is live to the microsecond - has to be otherwise could overbook seats. Similar things occur with your quick statement (current CARS account balance) which is actually the value loaded at 8AM, thus payments may not be reflected until the next workday 8AM loading of data. Of course, the e-bill is even worse, being a snapshot taken once each month and kept frozen as if it were patterns of stains on pureed dried and bleached dead tree (paper statements). </li>
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<p>Also, and this is really important, the system at schedule.berkeley.edu lists the registration stats for a class but it too is only loaded once a day at about 8AM. Therefore, on the day of your telebears appointment, if you look an hour before logging in, the entry for your class may come up and tell you there are plenty of open seats, but in the hours since 8AM they could have filled. The way to get to the real-time value is to click on that small link at the bottom of each class entry in the schedule system, the one that says “Click here for current enrollment information and course restrictions” because that shows you the instantaneous status without having to log into telebears. Using the click link from schedule.berkeley.edu does not count towards the lockout that can happen if you use telebears too many times in a phase, so it is the preferable way to look at status up until you are ready to actually add, change or drop a class. </p>
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<li><p>The telebears slot is recorded as 24 hours commencing from your start time. It would have been more obvious if you did not have an intervening weekend, which doesn’t count. Regardless of the what is listed, from the first second of the slot onwards to the complete end of the phase, you can make additional changes. There are some time of day rules and these also vary between when in telebears phases and when in the “adjustment” period which is the time after phase II ends. Look at registrar.berkeley.edu for all those rules.</p></li>
<li><p>As lonesoul has explained, Decals are loaded late, they are not really part of the class schedule, instead they are independently managed but then grafted on to telebears to funnel the units and grade credit to your transcript. In other words, each Decal has a ‘sponsoring’ department which assigns that Decal a 98 or 198 course number in their department, for purposes of recording a grade for you.When you take Decals, at the end of the semester you see classes like English 98 and History 98, although they may have been Harry Potter and Batman, respectively, in the decal. In return for the sponsorship, the decal tends to have a bit of spin that aligns with the department - perhaps researching the history of batman or critiquing some essay written about the Harry Potter novels. It is very, very lighthanded, so much so that it is usually not noticed unless you look for it. </p></li>
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<p>Because DeCals are not really part of the course catalog or scheduling system, signing up for them is done in a variety of ways. Some allow anyone that shows up for the first session (which may be in the second or third week of the semester, but that is just an additional wrinkle on an already messy system). Some have you email and you are listed by the instructors (students who run the class) right away. Some are high demand and don’t have enough space to accomodate all who want to apply. Those can adjudicate the ties by time of request, or by requesting a compelling application that the instructors use to make the choices, or by some fair and random process while in the first session. Once it settles out, a week or two later, you can add the class via telebears through its oddball xxxx 98 or xxxx 198 pseudo-class. The difference, of course, is that juniors and seniors get the 198 version of the code while underclassmen receive the 98 code - thus for upperclassmen it counts towards your minimum required upper division class units to graduate. Registration may require a course entry code (CEC) which is a unique number for each seat that is avialable in a class, handed out to you by the DeCal instructor.</p>
<p>If you look through the schedule.berkeley.edu system, you will find plenty of 98 and 198 listings - these may not be open for registration, but they may indeed be open, only you don’t know which Decal is assigned to which, if a sponsoring department has five or six different ‘sections’ of xxxx 98 corresponding to five or six DeCals they support. Equally, however, it could be added later and not yet visible, because there are only two reasons that there needs to be any linkage from DeCal into the xxxx 98/198 stuff:</p>
<p>1 - since Decals count toward minimum unit loads, you want to be registered in the xxx 98/198 class for your Decal by the time that the colleges do their scan to enforce minimum loads - also important for those on FA which require a full load for full payment.</p>
<p>2 - you won’t get credit for the units nor see the P (or NP) on your transcript unless you have linked to the xxxx 98/198 pseudo-class. </p>
<p>Because of all of the above, many times you won’t know which decal you will be in until a couple of weeks into the semester and you might be below the 12 or 13 unit minimum for your college until that point. It is normal, even if a bit nervewracking the first time you go through it. It is easy enough to get into SOME decal, thus there is always a safety net, leaving you free to focus on getting into the one you really want.</p>