Courses and Waitlists

  • Please note when you register for courses: Sections with ‘WL’ in them (e.g., WL1) are waitlist sections.
  • If you do not fulfill a prerequisite for a COGS course and you sign up for the waitlist, you will not be moved into the course section unless you receive written permission from the course instructor. As long as you do not obtain and provide written permission, available seats will be allocated to the next student in line.
  • If you are next in line in a waitlist for a COGS course and you have a scheduling conflict with a course that you are already registered for, you will receive an email from the Program Coordinator. If you do not respond within 24 hours, the seat will be allocated to the next student in line.
  • If you are moved from a COGS 300 waitlist section into COGS 300 001 or COGS 300 002 (the lecture sections), you will not be assigned a LAB section automatically. Remember to register for a LAB section once you are moved into the lecture section.
  • You should not remain in the waitlist after the add/drop deadline.

Registration and Waitlist Management

  • If SSC says “Advising required before registration. See Faculty Advisor...” please reach out to your Faculty Advising Office.
  • If SSC says that you cannot register because you are on financial hold, please reach out to your Enrolment Services Advisor. To find your advisor's contact information, log into your SSC and select “UBC Contacts” under Personal Info.

If there is a waitlist for a course that you want and have the prerequisites for, you should register for it right away through the SSC. As space frees up in the course, students will manually be moved from the waitlist into the course section. This is not done every day. The Program Coordinator will contact you by e-mail to inform you when you have been moved into a course section.

Please register for the waitlist as soon as you can.

Once a course is blocked (because it reached capacity), nobody can register for the course through SSC even after students drop the course. Students on the waitlist will be moved into the course section as seats become available, but there can be a time lag between when a student drops a course and when a student on the waitlist is moved into the section (this is when you will see a section that is "blocked" but has seats available).

The one time a COGS course may be unblocked in SSC after it was blocked is when the following three conditions are met: 1) the term has started, 2) there are a significant number of available seats in the course section (e.g. 20 seats), and 3) there is nobody in the waitlist. Do not contact the Program Coordinator asking whether a course will be unblocked.

Please register for the waitlist. Once course registration period ends, the Program will fill any remaining restricted seats with students who are registered on the waitlist. This might not happen until close to the start of the term in which the course runs.

Unfortunately, you can only register on the waitlist and hope for the best. Waitlists are managed according to the priorities described above. The Program Coordinator will contact you by e-mail to inform you when you have been moved into a course section.

The Program is not able to add you into a lab section that is already full.

Unfortunately this is not in the COGS Program’s purview. Register for the waitlist as soon as you can (if there is one available).

As seats become available, students are moved manually from the waitlist into the course by the Program (not by the registration system) on a priority basis:

  1. COGS majors, by year (4, 3, 2) and timestamp
  2. Everyone else by timestamp

In all cases, students must have the proper prerequisites for the course. If you do not have the proper prerequisites for the course, you must contact the course instructor and obtain permission to take the course. If you have not obtained permission from the instructor, you will not be moved into the course section and the next student on the waitlist will be moved into the course section instead.

All waitlists are managed according to the priorities described above. Do not contact instructors or the Program Coordinator to ask about your waitlist position or to request the ability to jump the queue.

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.

Once a course is blocked (since it reached capacity), nobody can register for the course through SSC even after students drop the course. Students on the waiting list will be moved into the course section as seats become available, but there can be a time lag between when a student drops a course and when a student on the waiting list is moved into the section (and this is when you will see a section that is "blocked" but has seats available).

The one time a COGS course may be unblocked in SSC after it was blocked is when the following three conditions are met: 1) the term started, 2) there are a significant number of available seats in the course section (e.g. 20 seats), and 3) there is nobody in the waitlist. Do not contact the Program Coordinator asking whether a course will be unblocked.

COGN, COGS, COGV, and COMI are all COGS specializations. That is to say, the section is restricted for COGS majors. If you are a COGS major you qualify for a restricted seat.

COMI stands for Computational Intelligence and Design (CPSC stream of COGS).

If you are a non-BA or BSc student (BIE students are not under the BA category; BIE students are in their own BIE category) contact the course instructor to obtain permission to take the course, and contact the Program Coordinator to sign up for the waitlist.

  1. Meet your Faculty's year promotion requirements. Students register, by year: year 4, year 1, year 3, and year 2. If you plan to register for a 400-level course and do not get promoted into year 4, you will register two weeks after all the year 4's register. This will decrease your chances of getting into the course.
  2. Be sure to register for courses as soon as your registration time becomes available. Within each year, students register in descending order of GPA. Your best chance of avoiding a waitlist is to improve your GPA. When your GPA goes up, you register earlier. Furthermore, if you have year 2 standing this year, note that you will likely* be in year 3 next year (*make sure you meet your year promotion requirements), which means you will get to register before any of the year 2 students.
  3. Make sure that you are not in a situation where SSC physically 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.

 

Add/Drop Deadlines and Standing Deferrals

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

The withdrawal dates (both the last day to withdraw without a W standing and the last day to withdraw with a W standing) are also listed under each individual course section.

It is not under the COGS Program’s purview to change a student’s registration status after the add/drop deadline.

Before then, the Program will move as many people from the waitlists into courses, as possible, sometimes on a daily basis in the days leading up to the add/drop deadline. However, the Program Coordinator does not work up till midnight. Do not expect to be added to a course on 11:59pm on the day of 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), and cc cogs.advising{at}ubc.ca on the email.

 

Course Scheduling and Degree Planning

This is beyond the Program's purview. If you are a BA student, please see the Course Conflicts section here. If you are a BSc student, please fill out the Course Conflict Registration Form that can be found here.

Unfortunately, there is no system of switching course sections. If you drop a course after it is blocked, you will risk losing your seat. If there are many 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 to get back into the course.

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

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

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

It 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 have taken those module courses back when they were 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 (abbreviated as "COMI") stream is under the Department of Computer Science, which makes students in that stream eligible for restricted seats in CPSC courses.

This question is interpreted as: "it is time consuming to sift through the long list of courses." Yes, it is time consuming, so here is an alternative way to search for courses using specific criteria which may come in handy immediately or in the future:

  1. Go to the course schedule
  2. On the top menu, click on Search > Courses (note that there's also an "Instructor" search. If you loved taking a course with a particular professor, you can look at all the courses they're teaching.)
  3. You will see some form fields. Some relevant ones are Subject Area (put in the 4-letter course code), Course Number (make use of the wild card search! You can search for 300-level courses by entering 3*), and Status (you can search for courses that have seats available).
  4. Click on the Search for Sections button.

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

There is one exception - for courses that end 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.