Honor students get early registration

Nov 5 2009 - 12:12am | Luis Baez

There are two kinds of students at Texas State. There are the students who get to register early and students who have to make do with the classes that are not full — even though those full classes are probably the ones they need.

I bet you’re asking yourself, “Where can I sign up?”

The answer is with the University Honors Program.

Twice a year the honors program hosts an event where professors showcase the class they will teach the following semester and encourage honors students to sign up.

After the meeting, honors students are required to fill out a form requesting permission to register for the classes and, if granted, they can enroll for them a day earlier than everyone else.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems.

Before I start though, let me make one thing clear. I understand the need for honors students to be able to hold a spot in a normal course just in case they do not get permission to register for the honors equivalent. This makes perfect sense.

What does not make sense is if a student has no intentions to take an honors course, but are still in the system, they get access to early registration. This means the honors program might become the equivalent of a “register early pass” and students who take the extra effort get to do so.

I doubt the program wants to give the impression early registration is its sole benefit.

There are 357 spots each semester for honors courses, but the mailing roster on TRACS shows more than 357 students in the program.
This creates problems for students who have to register with everyone else.

If a student tries to register for a class they need to take and see the dreaded “0” in the empty spots section, they are forced to take a guess between three choices.

The class might be full because there are students who actually intend to take it.

The second possibility is the class is full because there are honors students who are holding seats in case they are not allowed to register for an honors course.

The final option is there are “honors” students who are not taking honors courses but beat them in registration because they got to apply early. This leaves the student with finding a class they do not want to take, or hoping the same thing won’t happen to them next semester.

The solution seems very simple.

The honors program should create a system that makes sure the only students who have access to early registration are students who intend to graduate in the program. If a student did not fill out a request form for an honors class, they should not have access to early registration.

The program needs to make sure those who are doing the work to be honors students get to reap the benefits, especially when the options of every other student are at stake.

—Luis Baez is a political science junior

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