Choosing Courses | Office of the Registrar

When your course enrolment start time begins on ACORN, you should enrol in all of your desired courses (ideally) when your start time begins, or shortly thereafter as courses fill up quickly. You can continue to make changes before classes begin without financial penalty. Determine how many courses you are eligible to take, and make a list of back up courses in case your first choices have no spaces available.

Calendar

You will find program and course descriptions to help you with your selection.

Timetable

Once you identify the courses you wish to take, search them in the Timetable to see when they are offered. As you build your schedule for the upcoming semester, the Timetable will help you ensure that you do not have any conflicts (i.e., do not enrol in courses that are offered at the same time).

Registrar's Guide

We've compiled our best tips and advice for course enrolment and registration in this guide. We walk you through course enrolment step-by-step, including:

How to read a course code
Waitlist courses
Explaining the different lecture sections
Tutorials
Practicals

ACORN

Course enrolment is done online through ACORN, U of T's primary system that manages your registration, financial information, personal information, academic records, and more.
To login to ACORN, use your UTORid and password.

Start time and Year of Study

You can check the dates and deadlines section to find out when you will be eligible to enrol in courses on ACORN. You will also find the date when you can view your start time on ACORN, this will let you know what time you may begin adding courses on your course enrolment date. Course selection dates will be listed by year of study and your year of study is based on the number of credits you have obtained, not by the number of years you have attended, as follows:

1st Year = 3.5 credits or fewer
2nd Year = 4.0 – 8.5 credits
3rd Year = 9.0 – 13.5 credits
4th Year = 14.0 + credits

Step-by-Step Tutorials

These visual tutorials will guide you through the course enrolment steps:

Enrol in a course using the search function on ACORN
Add a course to your enrolment cart
Enrol in a course from the enrolment cart
Adding yourself to a waitlist if a course is full

Male student and female student in the microbiology lab

Waitlists

If a course is full, add yourself to the waitlist. ACORN will automatically put you into it if a space becomes available, and you are next on the list.

Credit / No Credit Courses

*Adjustments have been made to the Cr/NCr process for Winter 2020 courses due to COVID-19.

Course Enrolment Tutorials

Step-by-step visual tutorials for ACORN: how to search for courses, enrolling in courses, waitlists, add or switch courses, and more.