Good afternoon,
This email provides three key items for course scheduling for the Fall 2025 semester: changes to course cancellations, making adjustments to your schedule, and possible seat shortages.
Change to the Course Cancellation Process for Low Enrollment
Departments and schools have the ability to cancel courses for low enrollment. Previously, OTR followed a process that required a department to set the max enrollment to zero, contact students, and then cancel the course in CourseLeaf CLSS. Based on feedback we have received, we hope to streamline this process for you.
If a course needs to be canceled due to low enrollment, the department/school must email registrar@rice.edu with the request to cancel the course. Once OTR receives the request, we will immediately cancel the course, drop the students, and email the students to notify them of the cancellation. This change will give students more time to register for a new course and provide a uniform process across the university.
Making Adjustments to Your Schedule for Fall 2025
If you plan on making adjustments to your course offerings, please be aware that the changes you make will be made “live.” For example, if a course currently has 15 enrolled and a max enrollment of 15 students, adding 5 seats right now will open those 5 seats to continuing students. If you plan on opening seats like that to incoming students, we suggest that you wait until the start of O-Week to add seats. This is because continuing student registration is paused during O-Week, and you will have time to add seats prior to the incoming undergraduates registering.
Possible Seat Shortages
As you may recall, there were some challenges in previous Fall semesters with incoming students registering for some courses because there were not enough available seats. I’m writing to provide you with information to help you and your department make an informed decision regarding the Fall 2025 schedule prior to the incoming students registering. The hope would be that this could assist you in adding more seats or sections, should that be an appropriate action.
We realize that there are additional constraints, including curricular reasons, why a class should not increase in size or why additional sections cannot be opened. To be clear, OTR is not requesting that you add seats or sections; rather, we are simply providing you with information well ahead of incoming student registration so that you are not surprised and can make adjustments if your department chooses to do so, and those adjustments are appropriate.
We have created a Tableau dataviz titled Fall 2025 Possible Seat Deficits, which presents a subset of courses that appear to have a potential seat deficit that may prove registration difficult for incoming students. If you are unable to access the report, please let us know.
What we did:
- Took the current Fall 2025 schedule and reviewed the Fall 2024 registration as of the 12th Class Day for courses that are slated to be offered in Fall 2025 and were offered in Fall 2024.
- Took all Fall 2025 courses that had 3 or more incoming students registered in Fall 2024.
- Reviewed currently available seats.
- Subtracted the number of incoming students registered in Fall 2024 from the available seats.
- Displayed any course with a negative seat situation.
Important note: The Fall 2025 incoming class is projected to be approximately 10% larger than the Fall 2024 incoming class. Having this information is key when evaluating whether additional seats may be needed for classes that new incoming students typically take during their first semester.
Notes:
- This is not a perfect science; however, we have done something similar for several years in a row now, and the results have been close to the actual demand for those courses. If you do not have any courses on this list, then your courses currently appear to have enough seats. This, of course, may change based on actual student registration.
- This report does not include courses offered in Fall 2024 but have not been scheduled for Fall 2025; it also does not include Fall 2025 courses not offered in Fall 2024.
Questions? Need help?
If you are attempting to do something specific to your course offerings and need assistance, please don’t hesitate to ask—we would be glad to assist you to get you what you need done.
Thank you,
Office of the Registrar
