Reign Larong, a second-year social work student, found herself navigating a familiar struggle at the start of the semester: securing a slot in a Soc Sci 1 class.
For the second year in a row, she is in the thick of teacher’s prerogative or prerog season—the nerve-wracking process of pleading for class slots directly from professors or departments. Despite successfully enlisting a regular load of 15 units during the second round of pre-enlistment, she was determined to stick to her curriculum’s prescribed 18 units for that semester.
“I would like to stick sa 18 units na that’s really aligned or required in my course,” she said. “There’s another GE elective I have to retake, [and I] really want to take [Soc Sci 1] para ‘di masyado maging heavy for the next acad year.”
Reign’s experience reflects the reality many UP students face—desiring to graduate on time, yet often impeded by the largely luck-based enlistment system that compels many to resort to asking for teacher’s prerog.
Reign is a social work student prerogging for the second year in a row for the same GE class, still unable to secure a slot. (Marcus Azcarraga/Philippine Collegian)
On the first day of classes, she tried to prerog but found no class willing to accept her. Undeterred, she returned the following day and spent minutes anxiously waiting outside a classroom, hoping to plead her case to a professor. When it became clear that the professor would not hold class that day, she joined a group of equally determined students heading to another venue where a different Soc Sci 1 class was being held. For many, this unpredictability is the most challenging aspect of prerogging.
Outside classrooms and in the offices of various units, students linger, some fidgeting with their phones, others sitting cross-legged on the floor or huddled in quiet conversation. They wait, eyes darting toward doors that might open any moment, hoping for a chance to secure the slots they desperately need.
Students line up outside the administrative office of the Philosophy department hoping to prerog for a class. (Marcus Azcarraga/Philippine Collegian)
The anxiety of prerogging extends beyond physically waiting outside classrooms. Reign constantly monitors the Computerized Registration System (CRS) page, checking for classes that might still have available slots and taking note of venues with schedules that could fit her current load. She also surveyed the Facebook pages of the offering units for announcements, turned to Reddit threads for tips on navigating the process and potential email addresses she can contact, and sought advice from peers about professors known to accept prerog requests.
“It’s difficult because during the process, as much as [some profs] want to accommodate anyone who needs a slot in that specific GE course, they cannot because there’s a limit to how many students they can accept,” Reign shared.
A department posts guidelines for prerogging and announces new class sections outside its doors. (Marcus Azcarraga/Philippine Collegian)
With a P2.08 billion budget cut for 2025, UP faces even greater resource constraints, compounding the already challenging system that struggles to meet students' needs. This significant reduction means fewer resources for infrastructure projects, directly limiting the university’s ability to build new classrooms or renovate existing ones. At the same time, the recurrent rejection of UP’s bid to hire more permanent posts diminishes the university's capacity to offer additional classes.
Reign holds onto a flicker of hope for change—one where the university and the national government finally heed the calls of students, making sure that no one else would wait outside classrooms in uncertainty, monitor pages anxiously, and compete with one another just to secure their needed slots. ●
