Courses and Waitlists

You can find tutorials and other helpful information here: https://workday.students.ubc.ca/

• Financial hold: please reach out to your Enrolment Services Advisor.
• Other/unknown: please reach out to your Faculty Advising Office (Arts or Science Advising).

Register onto the waitlist right away. As space frees up in the course, students will be notified to move from the waitlist into the course section.

Ultimately registration occurs on a first-come-first-serve basis, and additional seats in COGS courses will not be added (with the exception of COGS 402: if COGS 402 is full but you have a supervisor lined up for your COGS 402 project, please email cogs.advising@ubc.ca).

A majority of seats in 300- and 400-level COGS courses are initially restricted to COGS students. Non-COGS students will be able to register onto the waitlist, in the event all general seats in the course have been filled. After all COGS students have had an opportunity to register, all remaining restricted seats in COGS courses will be released as general seats (typically about 1 month before the start of the semester).

Please register onto the waitlist, and you will be notified if a general seat becomes available.

Unfortunately, you can only register on the waitlist and hope for the best. Registration is on a first-come-first-serve basis, and additional seats will not be added to COGS courses. If you are in your final year and inability to register for the course will impact your ability to graduate on time, please contact the COGS Program Coordinator (cogs.advising{at}ubc.ca).

No - you cannot be added into a lab section that is already full.

Register for the waitlist as soon as you can (if there is one available), and reach out to the department offering the course if you have any questions about waitlists or seat restrictions. Some departments will release remaining restricted seats as general seats after all students who meet the restrictions have had an opportunity to register - this is up to the discretion of the department.

Senior (Year 4+) COGS students are given priority on the waitlist for COGS courses. Aside from this, students are moved off of the waitlist in the order in which they registered. Remember that to register for the waitlist, you must have all proper prerequisites for the course. If you do not have the proper prerequisites for the course, you must contact the course instructor to obtain permission to take the course.

No. Only reach out to the Program Coordinator regarding your position on the waitlist if missing registration in that particular course section will prevent you from graduating.

There is no answer to this, as there are too many variables to accurately predict the odds. It depends on the course, how much demand there is, and how many students drop the course before the add/drop deadline.

If you are a non-B.A. or B.Sc. student, please contact the course instructor to obtain permission to take the course, then contact the Program Coordinator.

1. Meet your Faculty's year promotion requirements. Students register by year: year 4, year 1, year 3, then year 2. If you plan to register for a 400-level course but have not been promoted into year 4, you will register two weeks after all the year 4s register. This will decrease your chances of getting into the course.
2. Increase your GPA. Within each year, students register in descending order of GPA. When your GPA goes up, you register earlier, thus are more likely to get a seat in a course before it is full.
3. Be sure to register for courses as soon as your registration time becomes available.
4. Make sure that you are not in a situation where Workday prohibits you from registering from courses (e.g. financial hold). The COGS Program Coordinator will not be able to assist you with this. If you have a financial hold situation, contact your Enrolment Services Advisor to resolve the issue in advance.

Additional seats require additional instructors, teaching assistants, and classroom space (and potentially classrooms). Resources are finite.

The information can be found here: https://students.ubc.ca/enrolment/registration/course-change-dates

or here: https://students.ubc.ca/enrolment/dates-deadlines

or here: http://www.calendar.ubc.ca/vancouver/index.cfm?page=deadlines

It is not possible for the COGS Coordinator to change a student’s registration status after the add/drop deadline. To add (and drop) a course once the deadline passes, you will need to obtain permission from your home Faculty. Please consult your Faculty Advising Office.

No. To add (and drop) a course after the deadline, you will need to obtain permission from your home Faculty. Please consult your Faculty Advising Office.

Reach out to your COGS course instructor to find out what the format of your SD exam (or your SD final deliverable for COGS courses with no final exams) will be and when it would be administered (e.g. in-person or online, administered during the official SD exam period or outside of the SD exam period). CC cogs.advising@ubc.ca in the email.

If you are a B.A. student, please see the Course Conflicts section here. If you are a B.Sc. student, please fill out the Course Conflict Registration Form that can be found here.

In Workday, you can “swap” a registered course, which means you can switch the course you’re already signed up for with a different one (space permitting). By swapping, you will not lose your spot in your current course until your seat in the new course or section is confirmed. More information can be found here:  https://workday.students.ubc.ca/course-registration/swapping-a-course/

If you drop a course after it is full, you will risk losing your seat. If there are students on the waiting list for that section, the probability of losing your seat is high. Students on the waiting list will be moved into the course section as seats open up. There is no guarantee you can get back into the course.

COGS 200, 300, 303, and 401 are not offered in the summer.

COGS 402 is offered all year (winter term 1, winter term 2, and across summer terms 1-2).

The COGS Program is not the right unit to ask. The respective department may have the answer, although it is not guaranteed until the course schedule is released.

This is to account for students who are coming back to university to finish their COGS degree that they declared in the past. Some returning students took those module courses back when they were still offered.

Some courses on the module list have restricted seats available for certain COGS streams. This is dependent on which Department the COGS stream is under. For example, the B.Sc. Computational Intelligence and Design stream falls under the Department of Computer Science, which makes students in that stream eligible for restricted seats in CPSC courses.

Some module courses may have partial seat restrictions, or restrictions that will be released after students meeting the restrictions have had an opportunity to register. You may wish to contact the department offering the course for details/to see if it is possible to be granted access to a restricted seat.

This question is interpreted as: "it is time consuming to sift through a long list of courses." Yes, it is time consuming. You will need to consume some of your own time, doing this for yourself.

No. More information on Cr/D/F can be found here:

• Arts: http://www.calendar.ubc.ca/vancouver/index.cfm?tree=12,197,282,1572
• Science: http://www.calendar.ubc.ca/vancouver/index.cfm?tree=12,215,410,1456

There is one exception - for courses that ended in Spring 2020 (amidst the COVID-19 pandemic), we waived the regulation which says that a course taken on Cr/D/F basis wouldn’t normally be able to satisfy a program requirement.