Course requests: limited enrollment

Sarah Herrick

Hi. We are in the process of setting up course requests and it doesn't appear that there is a way to limit the number of students who can request a particular course. Our core sequences in English, math, language and science are staffed based on the number of requests, so requests/enrollment can be unlimited; however, we have several courses for which only one or two sections will be taught. Under Departments & courses menu, when I click to edit a course, I see a field called “Maximum # Requests allowed,” but when I enter a number (say 10), the system continues to allow more than 10 students to request the course.

Longwinded to say … HELP! How do other schools handle this? It seems counterintuitive to allow 40 students request a course that we know we can offer to only 10 students. (At one point, our product manager suggested that we:

1. Offer the course and constantly manage the requests until the number reaches the limit, OR
2. Offer the course, download the requests, un-offer the course, sort the requests by request date and then re-add the first X number of students to make the request

Neither of these options sounds to be very efficient and I would love to know that there is a more elegant, system-driven solution. Thank you!!!