<p>Psychology 1 LEC section 01 has 451 students enrolled with a limit of 490 and has 50 students on the waiting list with a limit of 50.</p>
<p>This class won't let me add myself to the waiting list or to the class either. Waitlists - how do they work??</p>
<p>Rule 1 - any class that has secondary (S) sections (typically discussion or lab), you MUST be enrolled, not waitlisted, in an S section in order to be enrolled in the primary. Thus, while Psych 1 P 001 the primary lecture has a limit of 490, there are only enough discussion (S) spaces to get to 451. If they opened another couple of discussion sections, those might add the addiitonal spaces to actually fill the lecture. </p>
<p>Implication - the waitlist on the lecture is a result of a waitlist on the secondary sections.</p>
<p>Rule 2 - Once a class has all the seats filled for a category to which you match, you can only waitlist, even if there are open seats for other categories. For example, you might be a L&S student and find the seats for L&S students are filled but CNR has a seperate category that is not full, therefore a CNR student can enroll but you can only waitlist.</p>
<p>Rule 3 - If a section has a limit on the size of the waitlist, once it gets to that number, you cannot waitlist for the section.</p>
<p>Rule 4 - If a class is only a primary, then the waitlist for it works like rules 2 and 3, otherwise its waitlist works by rule 1</p>
<p>The unusual situation here is a cap on the waitlist for the primary that is less than the sum of the waitlist maximums for the secondaries. There are 18 secondary sections with 25 waitlist max allowed in each, which normally would swell the primary to 225 on the waitlist when all the secondaries were at max waitlist. That is how it works in almost all big lecture classes. In this case, however, the cap for the lecture was set at 50, thus the waitlists in the secondaries are pretty low on average (less than 3 per section on average). </p>
<p>I can only speculate that the target of 50 was set by the famous rule of 10%, that the department expects about 50 to clear the waitlist and get in. They don’t want long queues of waiting students who will be frustrated when they ultimately fail to get in, so they set the coursewide limit at that but chose to let the waitlists by secondary flow more naturally. Perhaps they will add a discussion to handle the most popular time (i.e. the longest waitlist) thus clearing part of the waitlist in one easy step. They could pull in as many as 39 and still fit in the capacity of the hall for the main lecture - a couple of extra GSIs or UGSIs to each handle 19 or 20 and they then need only 11 more to drop in order to fully enroll the waitlist. It is also a manual waitlist meaning they can jockey around who they pull in, if someone is waitlisted on a discussion but another discussion meets at the same time and has an opening, they can move the student unilaterally. They can also contact the student to see if they can tolerate a switch in discussion times.</p>
<p>Ah, that makes sense. Thank you!</p>