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A couple of my friends in the CSE program (not at texas though) had to take on a 5th year due to the poor scheduling. Doesn't help that you have to apply to the program after you are already a freshman, so if you bomb a tough math or physics class your first semester you are set back pretty far and have to build up your GPA to even get into the major.

That sounds reasonable.

Not when one bad grade is due to a notoriously bad teacher. One poor professor should not be able to threaten a student's future by forcing them to change majors to be able to graduate without an additional $10K or more of debt.

Why? Why does this have to be the way that college works? Seems highly ineffective.

As a consequence of people entering the program at different times, required classes and electives are a blood sport to schedule. Some courses are only offered in fall or spring with a prerequisite class to be completed to schedule, so you could have to literally wait and sit with a very light schedule for a semester because you were a half semester off the 4 year trajectory, or the class was full and you have to wait until it's offered again. This ultimately wastes a lot of your time at college. I bet if scheduling was completely painless and not constrained around classes with a waitlist double the size of the class, and you could take your required classes any semester you'd like, people could get the CSE degree in 3 years and save quite a lot on tuition.

You can workaround this with advance planning though.

I wasn't affected by bombing any classes and got direct admit to CS [^1], but there were classes of interest offered only once a year which filled up quickly. I just took them e.g., a year early than expected to make up for that or disregarded the prereqs and learned just enough on the fly. Another technique that helps is emailing the professor in advance of registration or after it's full and letting them how interested you are. Even better if you can stop by their office in person.

Another trick is to get into your school's Honors program which typically allows early registration vs non-Honors.

There were also 1-2 courses I audited for knowledge instead of officially taking which let me invest in basic learning without adding the pressure of a grade to a heavy course load.

Ideally everyone would have an academic advisor that lets them know this kind of thing in advance.

If I were graduating high school today, I would give serious consideration to Lambda School instead of a CS degree; though I also believe that we haven't seen enough time pass for the long-term implications of a decision like this to play out yet (e.g., future career discrimination based on lack of degree).

[^1]: I feel for people that don't get direct admit into their engineering major. This part feels unfair IMO. I think that everyone should be able to start in their desired major by default and disqualify out vs default out and qualify in.

It definitely depends on the school, while you can direct admit to engineering, you are still not in the CSE major yet. If a prof let someone in a class because they 'expressed interest' over the 50 people in purgatory on the waitlist, there'd be protests at my campus. Classes fill to fire code room capacity. Honors scheduling is big though, but there are a lot of people in honors as well so it isn't always guaranteed.

I attend UT Austin and it's pretty well known the CS school is particularly overcrowded, especially wrt lack of professors.

Its ranking went up a lot somewhat recently, so I think its a growing pains thing. ECE is a bigger major but we don't have the same problems because the department has been around longer and growth not so fast.

There's also decent CS programs in other schools in that area, if someone really wants study CS and can't get into UT's program.

I had to write a script to constantly monitor my school's class scheduling system to get into a couple of classes. It was an interesting script because the system was an IBM 3270 style mainframe.

This has been a thing for a long time. Back around 2003-2004 people at UTexas used a site called classgrabber.

Back then people would also oversignup to classes then leave them after the first few class days of it didn’t work with schedule/etc.

I got into the AI class at my school (it was not overbooked) only to discover that I didn't have the necessary math background. Also, the class was going to be all math and wouldn't involve computers. It was not what I was expecting at all. Ended up dropping it after a week.

How did you test such a script?

I always thought about doing this, but since class signups only opened twice a year (once per semester), and that was the same time I needed to actually sign up for the classes, I concluded there would never be a time to debug and refine such a script.

When I was in school, I just had a python script that diffed the relevant part of the web page, and sent an email/SMS to my cell phone on any changes in the output. It didn't automatically do the registration though, which would have been slick.

Ah, sounds like your school's setup was different than mine. Our class signups opened once, at a set time and day, and it was just a matter of clicking the signup button fast enough. If people dropped, the spots would go to people on a waitlist, also determined at the original signup time.

I've written a couple of scripts over the years to email me when certain things happen on things I don't own, and as long as you're cool with a few false positives, it's not too difficult.

Say you're waiting for something on a website to become available. I'd look for some language on the page about availability that's likely to change when available. I don't know what they're going to change it to, but I know that it'll (probably change). I set up a script to run every few minutes to check that particular spot on the page. If it changes, I get an email.

Maybe I got an email when it changed from 'unavailable' to 'available soon', but that's okay, that means it'll definitely work when it's available for real.

There's always a chance that it won't work, but if you can reasonably assert what is likely to change, it's very easy to monitor it.

I've written this type of script before - I didn't need too much in the way of debugging. Mine (similar to GP, it seems) didn't actually do the registration, just save the current state of known divs or even the whole page. Then it would send me an update if that changed.

So, I didn't need to debug what happens when the class shows "open" - I just saved the div that said "closed" and sent myself an email/text any time it didn't say exactly that.

You could test it by having it sign up for undesirable classes like underwater basket weaving that had plenty of openings. The terminal interface was kind of gross to script, but the underlying data was pretty easy.

You basically had to just send the correct number of arrow key presses to get the cursor to the correct field, send the digits, and then send the enter key. Parse the data that comes back, and add the routine to cursor over to the "add course" prompt when it says there is an availability. The script was totally gross looking but it worked.

At my school the class signup system was open after the initial set had been loaded in to IIRC 2 weeks after class starts. This allowed students to shuffle classes around as needed, and it also gave me the opportunity to write a script against its interface.

In short, you gave the school a list of the classes you wanted to take. The school loaded everybody's information into the computer and had it make the first set of assignments. Then you got back the schedule and discovered that the computer had put you in classes at 7AM, 11AM, 4PM, and 6PM MWF and only one class on TTh so you had to go in and shuffle your classes around until you got a reasonable schedule. Or you would discover that all of your electives filled up before you had a chance so now you're in a fight to get into the classes.

It sounds all Mad Max, but the schedules were in such flux that it was usually possible to get the classes you wanted. I only remember getting screwed once, on a mandatory class with only two or three timeslots and one of which was highly undesirable (7AM MWF) and the other two timeslots never had an opening. Worse, the professor for that class had a heavy accent and tended to drone slowly in a monotone.

The 3270 was the terminal, not the mainframe itself. Many happy memories...

At UCLA, the Film major is notorious for being difficult to get into. Some colleges have majors that they are 'known' for. Supply-and-demand being what it is, this makes it difficult to get into these programs. That's not to say that you can't take a few classes in those programs every now and again. If anything, having a bit of that in-demand major (and having a broader knowledge base with another major/minor) is better than having none of it. When it comes to learning, perfect is the enemy of good.

I learned a "trick" to getting into these types of courses when I was in college. I was always polite to the department secretaries and treated them like human beings instead of people who exist only to serve me. The number of other students that failed to treat the department staff like people always shocked me. In any case, they were almost always able to just add me to classes, even when the registrar indicated they were full.

^ This

I worked in the CS Dept in college and this is a big one. Everyone in the department is there to support you and is happy to help, and the chair too. It's surprising how few CS students actually take advantage of these resources.

You can also use this to get into grad classes as an undergrad even if the course scheduling system blocks you.

Signing up on a course waitlist also helps give the department more info to be able to potentially move it to a bigger room or add additional sections.

There's often the ability for professors to accept more than the limit on a case-by-case basis, at their discretion. If you approach a professor and come across as a motivated and serious student, there's a good chance you'll be able to get in. Contrary to popular belief, most professors care about undergraduate education and want to help motivated students.

At my uni the class sizes were huge, usually 1:300-400, and they only offer 1-2 possible class times. It feels like staff are dropping left and right so the profs that stay on are forced to do this. Many cs/engineering kids cant take the intro classes for a couple semesters, many upperclassmen can't take courses which are only offered in spring or only fall.

My tuition would keep going up so I don't know why they can't afford to pay more professors.