Written by Becky DiMattia, March 2022

Objective: On the Waitlist Request Form, a key piece is the dropdown menu of courses, which allows students to request only courses that are waitlistable and offered in that semester. This is the process for determining which courses are waitlistable, and adding them to the form drop down menu.

Who: AD or AR (usually AD)

When: Prepare the list and the form in the week before each registration date, to ensure that the form is ready to go on each registration day. In the week before grad registration, add just the grad waitlistable courses, then the following week, add in the undergrad courses. Key part: on the morning of registration, add the semester to the semester drop-down menu on the waitlist form, then add the conditional logic that the relevant list of courses only is shown when the user selects that semester. (ie you want the Fall course dropdown menu to appear when the user selects Fall from the semester drop down)

Procedure for getting a list of waitlistable courses:

  1. Open this file – R:\QRO\WAITLISTS\waitlistable courses.xlsx
  2. Download the University Class Schedule for the upcoming semester, and add it in to the ‘semester schedule’ tab, starting at Column E
  3. In the ‘waitlistable’ tab, this should be a list of all courses, but it’s missing any new courses that have been added since last semester. To look for new courses, in the ‘semester schedule’ tab, filter Column D for N/A, and Column B to remove ‘E’ courses. This should reveal the newest courses. Copy these courses in to Column A in the waitlistable tab (copy values, so it doesn’t carry over the formula), find out if they’re waitlistable, and update Column B or C accordingly, then select all and sort by Course.
  4. Make sure all courses are marked for waitlistable or not: filter Column B to exclude Y, then filter Column C to remove x, then filter Column F to remove N/A (if we don’t know if a course is waitlistable, but it’s not being offered in the upcoming semester, we can deal with it later). For the remaining courses, find out if they’re waitlistable. If they’re web-reg restricted, that’s a No.
  5. Make sure all courses are marked as G or U – clear filters, then filter Column E for blanks, and fill in Column E.
  6. Finally, to filter for waitlistable courses – filter Column B for Y, if it’s the week before grad registration, filter Column E to exclude U (then include them the following week when you do this again before undergrad registration), filter Column F to exclude N/A. Then scroll down to see where Column H indicates that the first section of that course is cancelled. Look up each one to see if that’s the only section (in which case exclude it from the list), or if there are other sections that are being offered (in which case leave it in). The courses remaining in Column A are your waitlistable courses. Select, copy and see below:

Procedure for adding the list of waitlistable courses to the waitlist form and the cross-enrollment form:

  1. Go to the waitlist form in the WordPress admin
  2. Scroll down to the Course Information section, and find the relevant COURSE field (drop-down menu). If this is for summer, it will have last summer’s year. If this is for Fall, it will have last Spring’s semester, and if this is for Spring, it will have last Fall’s semester – update the text accordingly.
  3. If that field is Hidden, un-hide it (in the ‘Advanced’ section on the right)
  4. To add your list of waitlistable courses to the COURSE drop-down menu, go to the General section on the right, scroll down and go to ‘Bulk Add / Predefined Choices’, and select the list that’s already there, delete it, Paste in the list that you copied above. Save.
  5. If the form is live (ie in Spring, when it’s open for summer reg, and you’re setting it up to add Fall), only do this step when you’re ready for the form to be open for Fall registration (ie the morning of registration: In the semester drop-down menu, add Fall, then go back to the Course drop-down menu that you just updated, and set the Conditional Logic that this field will only appear when the user selects Fall (or whatever semester) from the Semester drop-down menu.
  6. Test the live form.
  7. Same for the Cross-Enrollment form – go to that form, find the course drop-down menu, and update it to include the grad waitlistable courses for the upcoming semester.

Written by Becky DiMattia, March 2022

Objective: To set up and use the waitlist spreadsheet to manage the waitlist process

Who: All QRO are involved in this process. AR ‘owns’ the waitlist process, with AD doing the systemsy stuff

When: Every registration cycle:

PROCEDURES:

Procedure for setting up a new waitlist spreadsheet:

  1. Find the most recent waitlist spreadsheet, and Save As with the new semester name
  2. Unshare the file, remove all of last semester’s requests from the Requests and WP export tab, remove all but the first row of courses from the Waitlist tab, clear conditional formatting rules from Column G in the waitlist tab. Save.
  3. Go to the waitlistable courses spreadsheet (see above), unfilter, select/copy Columns A-E, go back to the waitlist spreadsheet, to the waitlistable tab (far right), and paste-values starting at Column A.
  4. Rename the semester schedule tab, download the University Class Schedule for the upcoming semester, and pop it in to that tab. Make a mental note of how many rows there are.
  5. On the Waitlists tab, select the one remaining row of courses, copy, Shift+PgDn to the # of rows in the schedule, plus 2, and Paste. Save.
  6. Remove stuff we don’t need:
  7. Filter for Column W (dept) = EX, MS, MF or MX – remove those rows
  8. Filter for Column H (EL) = 0, 999, or cancelled – remove those rows (this should get rid of any course second-rows, any remaining study abroad courses, and cancelled courses, but before you delete, glance at the list to see if there’s anything that shouldn’t be deleted)
  9. Filter for Column X (course) = FE323, MK323, OM323, QM323 or SM303 – remove those rows
  10. Update Column I –  ‘Actual Max Cap’ – for courses that have set pedagogical caps (these change occasionally, and here are some that are accurate as of 2022 – MO221 = 38, SI422 – 45, SM275 = 22 (and if we have to go higher, fill the sections evenly where possible), SM131 and SM132 = 42
  11. Update Column I – Actual Max Cap – to indicate max-seats in some of our smaller classrooms – for example, filter Column L (room capacity) for 39 and change the Actual Max Cap to 39 for all courses in 240 and 302 … and so on.
  12. You may want to set up some adjustments to help you visualize things – put all of AC221 in a box, for example (and so on for all group courses), add a row to summarize each set of courses (ie how many total AC221 requests), add conditional formatting to add a data-bar on the enrollments so you can visualize the bigger and smaller sections, etc.
  13. Share the file – Review tab > Share Workbook.