KnightWeb Registration:   Students should note that the Biology Chair's Office monitors the enrollment numbers in our courses continually throughout the registration period.  We sometimes increase/decrease the maximum enrollment for courses and/or open/close lectures/labs. Therefore, students should check our Biology KnightWeb offerings and seat availability throughout the registration period and register as soon as you are able to on KnightWeb and check again for openings during open registration and the drop/add period. 

In order for the registration process to be as fair as possible to ALL students, we will enforce the following:

- Don’t try to ‘hold’ seats for fellow students; it is not fair to others registering after you and we will do everything possible to make this difficult and to penalize students who do this.   In particular, we will not accommodate requests for special consideration by students who register early, but later end up wanting to change their schedule.

- Don’t hold out waiting for a particular combination of instructor/time to appear.  Choose from what is available at the time the registration process is FIRST open to you.  If you fail to register for an open section and come back later when all sections are full, you will NOT be assured of getting into the course.

- Do register as early as you can and contact your advisor or the Biology office if you run into problems in course selection.  However, appreciate that we simply are unable to satisfy every student’s choice of course/faculty/time.  The number of biology majors has nearly doubled over the last five years and with the SUNY budget as it is, we are not able to hire additional faculty that might allow us to do this.  Even if we could, it might not be a desirable thing—taking courses in areas that students didn’t think they were interested in has been a very good thing for lots and lots of biologists!!  A good biology education includes breadth and especially breadth beyond the narrow comfort zone that many students have.  We are not able to accommodate student work schedules, sports schedules, double majors, minors, etc.

- We will hold firm on enrollment maximums as required to adhere to fire code regulations and seating limitations in rooms.   

- Always be respectful and courteous when communicating with faculty and staff. 

- As mature adult students, your parents should not be calling to plead your case for being enrolled in a course.

Although we are unable to satisfy requests for specific courses, we do feel that we have an obligation to allow students to take what they need (vs. want) to graduate in four years (assuming that you achieve at least a C- in the courses required for the major, and assuming that you have met with your advisor and followed a reasonable curricular plan), and we will do everything that we can to allow this to happen (assuming that we don’t find out that the reason you’re in a problem was because you were ‘gaming’ the registration system!!! )