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by anonucbstudent 4671 days ago
Can you explain how being completely intolerant of the fact that students have lives helps with your resource constraints? People will be a couple minutes late. Things happen. I don't think it's reasonable to threaten kicking someone out of the class and failing them for being late once.

Again, if you want to say that you need to make the class as terrible as possible so that people drop, then just say so.
1 comments
dougtygar 4671 days ago
anon, sorry I was not completely clear:

I hate to make this request, but I need half to 2/3rds of the students to drop the course. I'm hoping that you will still be able to learn a lot from the class -- but I need to find a mechanism to make the class smaller. Being strict on attendance seemed like the "least bad" of several rather unattractive alternatives.

I'm hoping that someone has a better idea, and I'm completely open. Please come and see me in 739 Soda.

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jacalata 4671 days ago
Far far better idea: cancel all existing registrations and reopen it at 10am next Wednesday. If the system doesn't support that, then say you will be "reregistering" people by hand and the first x to be at your office at 10am Wednesday are in. Doesn't fuck over an entire semester for people. Was really easy to come up with. If you really wanted good ideas you could have asked the class in the first session or on your blog and surely someone would have had a better idea than your horrific plan to make everyone hate you and the class.
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dougtygar 4670 days ago
Jacalata -- I did look into dis-enrolling students, and was told it was a non-starter.

And I have to say that it is already a huge problem at Berkeley to simply get enrolled into a CS class. There are simply not enough resources to go around. That's why this class has a huge waitlist.

By the way, this problem is also occurring in other classes, but they are scheduled as Monday-Wednesday classes. My class is Tuesday-Thursday -- the first day of classes at Berkeley was 8/29. Monday is Labor Day holiday at Berkeley, so those other classes will have to deal with their situations on 9/4. (However, their TA deficits are not quite as large as those that we have in CS 161).

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