Instructional Research Review, 2001

What about those students who register late?

Do students who enroll in a course near the end of registration perform differently than those who enroll earlier?  The answer is a definite “yes.” A study was done for students enrolled in courses for the Fall 1999 semester, and the findings are illustrated by the accompanying charts on this and the next page.  The first three charts emphasize the following points:

• Students who register for a class later are more likely to withdraw from the class than those who register earlier.
• Students who register later receive fewer A’s.  In this study, students who registered the earliest averaged twice as many A’s as those who registered the latest.
• Students who register later receive more D’s and F’s.

Similar results also were found during a Fall 1997 district study.  DCCCD students who registered late were found to have a substantially higher withdrawal rate (20.4%) than those who did not register late (12.3%). And students who registered late had a lower grade point average than those who did not register late.

The last chart below shows how the number of registered courses increases as the end of registration nears.  Notice that many more courses are registered during the last 10 days of registration compared to the first 10 days.  This trend together with the connection between student performance and registration date leads to an unfortunate conclusion:

• Those students who receive more A’s and fewer withdrawals are smallest in number (early registrants).
• Those students who receive more D’s and F’s and who have more withdrawals are greatest in number (later registrants).