Waitlist Registration
Waitlisting assists in maximizing enrollment numbers in individual course sections. It allows institutions to track excess demand for seats in courses where enrollment limits and waitlists are full.
Waitlist Process
Seats are held for those students on a waitlist as seats become available due to drops and withdrawals. Students use waitlists to get in line for courses they need to fulfill their requirements.
Automated waitlist processing assists in managing the movement of students from waitlists to active registration statuses.
When a seat becomes available for registration, an e-mail notification is sent to the students UNCW email address and a registrar representative. Notification e-mails are only sent when available seats exist.
The time period in which the student must register before the next student is notified is defined as 24 hours from the date and time of an e-mail notification. The notification time period will be modified to 4 hours two days prior to drop/add for a given registration period.
When the time period has expired and the student has not registered for the course, the student is removed from the waitlist. Before the student is removed, the student's registration status is checked to see if it has changed from "waitlisted" to "registered".
If it has not, the process will update the student's registration status to DD (dropped/deleted), remove the registration record, and then notify the next student on the waitlist.
If no more waitlisted students exist, the notification processing stops. The dropped student is not notified of the status change.
Students can drop from the waitlist at any time in the same manner in which they drop from regular courses on the portal.
Seat Availability and Notifications
Seats become available for e-mail notification via your UNCW email address when the following occurs:
- A registered student is manually dropped or drops on the Registration Portal, and the resulting number of remaining available seats for the courses is greater than zero.
- The maximum enrollment is increased for the course (on SSASECT), and the resulting number of remaining available seats for the course is greater than zero.
- The automated process finds a notification that has expired, the course is removed from the notified student's list of registered courses, and the resulting number of remaining available seats for the course is greater than zero.
Unless there are more seats available than there are students on the waitlist, no students, other than those who have been notified, are allowed to enroll in the course.
Other students are only allowed to register as waitlisted if remaining waitlist seats exist. Normal registration eligibility checking occurs before a student can be added to a waitlist.
Waitlisted courses are included with registered courses in time conflict error checking so a course may not be waitlisted if a registered class already exists for that time slot. A student can only be waitlisted for one section of the same course.
When and How to Register
When a student is registered as waitlisted, a position on the waitlist is assigned using the waitlist priority rules in first-come, first-served order.
If the waitlisted student receives an available seat notification, that student can register for the course until the notification deadline has expired which is set at 24 hours (Please note: Two days prior to drop/add, this notification time period will drop to 4 hours).
In order to register for the course, the registration status must be changed from "waitlisted" to "registered."
This registration status can be processed in the Registration Portal by the student. If a waitlisted student who has not been notified tries to register for the course, an error is displayed, and registration is not allowed.
This will also be true for any student who is not yet registered and is not already on the waitlist.
It is important to note that closed [Closed Class] and permission [Override All Except Time Conf] overrides should not be used for any course that has a waitlist.
Students can view their current waitlist positions and notification deadlines on the Student Detail Schedule page in the Registration Portal.
Faculty can also see waitlisted students in Self-Service.