When Matt Pirih tried to register for Community Health 100, Contemporary Health, last year, he was disappointed to see it was full. Pirih, junior in Engineering, already had his schedule packed with upper-level math and science courses. He had planned to register for the health class since he began college and thought it would have been the perfect semester to take it.

“I thought Contemporary Health would give me practical knowledge and also would be a breather from math and science,” Pirih said.

For two weeks, he checked UI-Integrate for openings and visited the Contemporary Health professors and administration multiple times asking for special permission to join. Fortunately, a spot opened, and he was able to enroll.

Not everybody is as lucky as Pirih. Often students are blocked from a class because another student has “course shopped” it.

Course shopping is the practice of enrolling in a course with the expectation of sampling it, Linda Serra Hagedorn, chair of educational administration and policy at the University of Florida, said. Hagedorn was the lead author in a course shopping study conducted by the University of Florida, which was published in July in The Journal of Higher Education.

There are two types of course shoppers: cyclic and bulk. Cyclic shoppers are students who drop a class early in the semester and add another in its place, while bulk shoppers are those who sign up for more courses than they intend to take. According to the study, more than one in every three college students course shops.

“I think it’s pretty prevalent, especially among our older students,” Megan Tucker, academic adviser for the College of Communications, said. “Often I’ll see students put three or four advertising classes on their schedule, and later they want to drop them.”

Tucker said students course shop for a number of reasons, but most commonly they do it to see which class is easiest.

There are both positive and negative sides to course shopping. Students who drop a class because it is not suited well for them are acting wisely, Hagedorn said.

However, Hagedorn’s study looked at students who consistently course shopped and found they were more likely to have low GPAs, and in some cases, drop out of school entirely.

Course shopping is also detrimental to administrators who have a difficult time creating class schedules when they don’t have a realistic idea of who is seriously enrolled, Hagedorn said. In addition, course shopping can negatively affect students who are unable to take a class because another student is enrolled with the intention of dropping it.

To prevent problems created by course shopping, Texas recently passed a law limiting how much adding and dropping students at public colleges are allowed to do to their schedules.

The University currently restricts students from registering for more than 18 hours, but Tucker believes that may still be too many.

“I sometimes think we should move the limit down to 15 or 16 (hours) because some students add 18 and don’t plan on taking that last class,” Tucker said. “We need a realistic idea about classroom space, and it would be helpful if the limit was 15.”

Hagedorn believes colleges should do more to prevent course shopping.

“In an era of budget cuts and serious calls for accountability, colleges must be more cognizant of activities that put students at risk,” Hagedorn said.