<p>When it comes time to choose courses, do most people end up with the classes they want or is it really competitive to get into classes?</p>
<p>As long as one preregisters for a course that has an enrollment limit, shows up to the first session, and perhaps gets in touch with the professor enforcing the enrollment limit, it is very rare to be barred from a class.</p>
<p>For example, The Social Organization of Law has an enrollment limit of 100. Every year, about ~130 people preregister. Sarat, the professor, goes down the roster at the beginning of each of the first sessions, and anyone who has preregistered but isn’t present is cut from the course. In this way, the roster is whittled down until it falls to around 100. If you haven’t preregistered for Social Org., say, and you want to enroll, Sarat will let you in even if the enrollment should ultimately exceed 100, so as long as you let him know that you care, why you want to take the course, etc.</p>
<p>There are only a handful of courses at Amherst notorious for causing students grief. They are “Punishment, Politics, and Culture,” “Strange Russian Writers,” “Practice of Art,” and “Basic Drawing.”</p>