How popular are classes?

UCLA is a big school. While that's nice in lots of regards (diversity, lots of good infrastructure and services), this comes at a really big cost: enrollment. I've heard stories from so many professors that go something like "wait, you actually have to worry about getting in to your major classes?" And the answer is definitely, yes. Anyone who has spent any time on the UCLA subreddit can attest to the amount of posts that get made by people worried that a class that they need to take to graduate will fill up, and people have

How does undergraduate enrollment work?

UCLA assigns each student an enrollment appointment based on their class standing and a random number generator.

Enrollment is divided into three passes:

• Before anyone else goes, there is a Priority Enrollment Pass, where special students like Regent Scholars and atheletes get first pickings at the class.
• First Pass is the next pass, which allows all students (including students who enrolled in Priority Pass) to enroll in up to 10 units. The idea is that students can grab their high priority classes at this time so that they are secured "must-take" classes before they let the leashes off everyone else.
• Second Pass is when the Registrar opens the floodgates, allowing students to enroll in classes until they are satisfied (or they hit their unit limit, 19 for most students), only closing when the Study Lists (official list of classes a student is enrolled in) have their deadline.

The first pass times are distributed based on unit standing (more senior students are given higher priority to ensure they can graduate without worries about taking that one last class), and the second pass is usually exactly one week afterwards.

Enrollment Speed

So with that, we can see some really interesting trends arise in general for how "in demand" certain classes are by seeing how many people are enrolled over the time of each pass. Type a class into the search bar below, and check a class you're interested in. It'll show offerings of that class from both Winter and Spring 2020, and you can click on individual instructors to hide or show their data from the chart.

Attrition Rate

Another interesting thing we can do is check time after the quarter starts, and see what I call the "attrition rate" of certain classes, to see how many people drop a class, and when. This can be the cause of many things, such as the first homework or midterm being harder than expected, or the material getting boring/being different from expected.