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Office of theRegistrar

Lotteries

The Faculty has approved the following lottery guidelines for entering limited-enrollment courses at Haverford:

  1. If a student is interested in any limited-enrollment class, they must indicate such interest by registering for the class by the deadline established in the College Catalog. Students who do not register for limited-enrollment classes will not be included in the lottery, which the Registrar will run immediately following the registration deadline. The Registrar will post lottery results on this website thereafter.
  2. Students may request preferential treatment in a lottery for a limited enrollment course they have previously been lotteried out of (waitlisted or dropped), but they must do so before the Registrar runs course lotteries. A student may request preferential treatment in cases in which they have (a) tried once to get into a course that is offered only once each academic year or (b) tried twice to get into a course that meets each semester. Students must pre-register for the class and then immediately let the Registrar's office know by emailing hc-registrar [at] haverford.edu.
  3. If a student is lotteried into a class, they must attend the first meeting of the class and indicate to the Professor (typically by signing an attendance sheet) that they are interested in taking the course. If a student does not attend the first meeting of a limited-enrollment class and all meetings through the end of course drop/add period (i.e., the “academic verification” deadline) and does not apprise the instructor in a timely fashion of the reasons for this absence, their position will be given to the next person eligible on the waitlist.
  4. When an enrollment limit is approved by the Existing Curriculum Committee, ECC may authorize preference based on any of the following, as indicated in the Course Guide:
    • Specific Major(s)
    • Specific Class Year(s)
    • Specific Class Year with specific Major(s)
    • Specific Minor(s)
    • Specific Concentration(s)

    Lotteries defined by any other preference will require the specific approval of ECC, in consultation with the Registrar; in instances in which a Faculty member wants to employ preferences other than those specified above, and the Registrar's data management system cannot accommodate those preferences, it may be necessary for the Faculty member to conduct the lottery themselves.

  5. For all lower-division courses (100 level and some 200 level courses without prerequisites), a number of spots, to be determined by the Registrar in consultation with the relevant departments, will be reserved in the April registration for members of the incoming firstyear class.
  6. For all upper-division courses (300 level and above), unless the instructor requests otherwise, preference will be given by class: Seniors first, then Juniors, and so on.
  7. Students currently on campus who expect to be at Haverford the following semester/year, must register for the following semester. This includes also those studying abroad, who can either register via the web or send their course selections via email to the Registrar, who will register for them. Any student who fails to register by the appointed deadline will be excluded from all lotteries.
  8. Faculty Members will not ask the Registrar to place particular students in their classes or to employ criteria in carrying out lotteries other than those approved by EPC and advertised in the annual Course Guide.