Be sure to register for courses as soon as your registration time becomes available. Students register by year, in descending order of GPA: 4th year, then 1st year, then 3rd year, and finally 2nd year. Your best chance of avoiding a waitlist is to improve your GPA. When your GPA goes up, you register earlier.

We offer priority to students as discussed above. However, in fairness to students who registered in a timely manner, this priority is only extended students who register on waitlists during the first month of registration. We cannot extend priority to students who forget to register, change their minds, fail to plan ahead, or have dropped the course for whatever reason and now want to pick it up again.

Due to seat restrictions in lecture halls, we are not able to allow students to audit a course that is full or has a waitlist. We offer priority to students who need to take a course for credit.

First of all, please consult the UBC Calendar, and make sure that the course IS truly required. If the course is an elective, and there are other courses that you could take, please check and see if any of those courses have room in them. If there is another course you can take, and there is room in that course, you will need to register in it, even if it is not your preference. We cannot force add students to a full course if there is another available option. If, however, the course is a *required* course, and there are no other options available, please register on the waitlist immediately, and contact gradinfo@stat.ubc.ca as soon as you have registered on the waitlist. Please note that we will verify your request, and will only register you in the course if there are no other options available to you. We will not force register students on the basis of preference.

You can only register on the waitlist and hope for the best. We accommodate as many students as possible in our courses, and will move students off the waitlist as space become available. You might want to consider making an appointment with your departmental advisor to discuss course planning for future terms, in case you cannot get into the course you want in the current term. We strongly urge all students to plan their courses well in advance, taking into account prerequisites and recognizing that many of our courses are only offered once per year. Make sure you register as soon as your registration date and time permits.

Unfortunately, this is not always possible. Additional seats require additional TAs, bigger rooms, and more labs. Additional sections require additional instructors and TAs, additional rooms, and more labs. Though we do our best, it may not be possible to meet the demand for additional seats or sections.

Each course is different, and your chances of getting in are difficult to predict. Generally, a small number of seats in almost every course become free for various reasons, but please keep in mind our prioritization, as listed above.

All waitlists are managed according to the priorities listed above. Please do not contact instructors, advisors, or office staff to ask about your position on the waitlist, or to request special consideration. The exception is those students mentioned in item 3 above.

Once a waitlist is created, the main section is blocked and nobody can register in it. We move students from the waitlist into the course in batches, so it may be several days before we are able to full available seats from the waitlist. Please be patient and to not contact staff or instructors about this issue.

We don’t have waitlists for all of our courses. Some courses are offered in the summer, and students who are unable to register in the winter can take the course at that time. Some of our larger courses, such as Stat 200 and Stat 251, experience a great deal of movement in registration, and most students can get a seat if they are vigilant in terms of monitoring enrollment. If there is no waitlist for a full course, you’ll need to watch for a space to open up, and register yourself at that time.