Shortlist and credits

The registration window from the inside — allocating credits, adding courses, the refusals you may hit, and the ranking step that decides what you actually get.

This page is the mechanics: which screen, which button, in which order. What a credit is, what a shortlist is for and why the ranking matters are explained in Key concepts, and this page assumes you have read it.

There is one thing worth repeating before you start. You never submit your shortlist. There is no Submit button anywhere in this flow. Whatever is on your list when the window closes is what goes forward, so the work is in getting it right while the window is open.

Before you begin

You need three things, and all three are arranged by the program office rather than by you:

a cohort you belong to, showing under My Programs;
a registration window in that cohort that has opened and has not yet closed;
credits in your cohort budget that you have not already spent.

If My Programs is empty, or the cohort has no registration window, there is nothing to do on this page yet.

The walkthrough

Open your cohort

Choose My Programs and then your cohort. When the cohort has exactly one registration window, its card carries the closing date underneath the program name — "Registration window open until Jun 12, 2026".

Open the registration window

Inside the cohort, the tabs run Overview, Feed, Catalog, Classes and Registration Window. Choose Registration Window. The last tab is not translated and reads Registration Window whichever language you use.

The window's name appears at the top left with its closing date beside it, as Deadline followed by the date. If the cohort has more than one window, a green selector at the top right lists them all with their closing dates, and you can move between them from there.

Decide how much of your budget to spend here

At the top right, beside the window selector, sits a two-part button. The left half is labelled shortlist and opens your list. The right half shows two numbers — how many credits you have allocated to this window over how many you have left in the cohort, so 5/20 — and opens the allocation panel.

The panel is headed Allocate Credits and explains itself:

You can choose the number of days you want to allocate to this registration window. you can always modify this value before the deadline.

Drag the slider and choose Save. Two limits apply without being spelled out on screen:

You cannot go above what is left of your cohort budget, and a window may set a lower ceiling of its own. The figure in the little tag to the right of the slider is your actual ceiling.
You cannot go below the cost of the most expensive course already on your list. To go lower than that, remove the course first.

Browse the courses in the window

Below the header the window lists its courses, with the count beside the heading — Courses followed by a number in brackets.

Filter by on the left narrows the list: Electivity (Mandatory or Optional), Difficulty, Skills and Academic Organizations. On a narrow screen the same filters are behind the Filters button. The selector at the top right switches between List view and Calendar View; the calendar plots every session in the window, which is the quickest way to see where two courses would clash.

Open a course and read its cost

A course page states its cost as a number of days — "Costs 3 days" under the title, and 3 days again in the panel on the right, alongside the number of weeks and the hours per week. A course the program office has marked as compulsory carries a Mandatory Course label there.

Add it to your shortlist

Choose Add to Shortlist. When it works, the platform confirms and the button turns into a link to your shortlist.

Three things can stop it instead, and they are covered under When a course is refused below.

If you have not allocated any credits yet, ABS Elevate does not refuse — it opens the Allocate Credits panel first, then adds the course once you have saved a figure.

Rank your shortlist

Open the shortlist from the shortlist button. Under Course Choices the platform states what the ranking is for:

Program officers will use the ranking of your choices to schedule courses, and they will do their best to schedule the courses that are most important to you. You can modify this ranking until the deadline of the current registration window.

and, underneath, "We encourage to select as many courses as possible."

Each entry shows the course title and its cost in days, with Required beside the compulsory ones. On the right of each entry are three controls: Move up, Move down and Remove.

Put the course you most want at the top and work down. Then choose Save underneath the list. Reordering the list on screen changes nothing until you save it.

Leave it alone until the deadline

At the bottom of the shortlist page, a blue note reads "Your choices will be automatically submitted on " followed by the closing date and time. That is the whole submission process. You can come back and change the order, the courses and the allocated figure as often as you like until that moment.

The deadline is the end of it, not a formality

When the closing date and time pass, the shortlist page becomes read-only: the same courses in the same order, the allocated figure greyed out, and an orange note reading "Deadline execeeded. You can't edit your shortlist anymore after " with the date. The arrows and the remove buttons are gone.

On a course page, Add to Shortlist is greyed out and hovering it explains why — "Deadline exceeded, course cannot be added to shortlist" after the window has closed, "The registration hasn't opened yet" before it opens.

There is no grace period and no way to ask the screen for one. If something has gone wrong, that is a conversation with the program office, not with the platform.

When a course is refused

Not enough credits

If the course costs more than you have allocated to this window, a dialog appears headed Not enough credits:

You haven't allocated enough credits to shortlist this course

The Allocate Credits button in that dialog takes you to your shortlist, where you can raise the figure. Remember what is being compared: the course's cost against what you allocated to this window, not against your whole cohort budget. A learner with plenty of credits left over will still see this dialog if they allocated too little here.

A scheduling conflict

Two courses whose sessions overlap cannot both be on your shortlist. Adding the second one from a course page inside the registration window raises a dialog headed You already have a course at this time, which names the course already on your list and offers Review shortlist. That dialog is not translated; it is in English whichever language you use.

One thing not to confuse with this. The Catalog has a shortlisting button of its own, and it writes to a different list — a separate, unranked set of offerings shown under Your Offerings, which spends no credits and plays no part in the ranking above. It applies the same overlap rule through a dialog headed Shortlist Conflict, which names both courses and the dates over which they clash. So if it is that wording you meet rather than the one above, you were working in the catalog rather than in the registration window.

In both places the fix is the same: remove the course that is in the way, then add the one you want.

The course is already full

A course can have a maximum number of places. If the working main list for that course already fills them, you get a dialog headed Course is at its max capacity:

This course is already at its max capacity, you can still shortlist it. Though you'll be added to the wait list in a case a place from the main list is freed.

This one is not a refusal so much as a warning. I want to join the waitlist adds the course to your shortlist anyway. Whether that is worth a place on your list is a judgement about how likely a place is to come free, and Main list and waiting list is the page that will help you make it. That dialog is in English in both languages.

The ranking is the part people get wrong

Your order is the only lever you have

Most learners treat the shortlist as a basket and the order as cosmetic. It is the opposite. The order is the instruction; the basket is just what the instruction operates on.

When the window closes, your list is walked from the top down, spending the credits you allocated. A course reached while you can still afford it puts you on its main list. A course reached when you cannot goes to the waiting list — and the walk carries on regardless, so a cheap course near the bottom can still be granted after an expensive one above it was not.

That has one practical consequence, and it is the whole reason this page exists: a course you care about, ranked below more than your allocated credits can cover, is never reached with anything left to spend. Being early does not help. Adding more courses does not help. Putting it higher does.

Two habits follow from that.

Rank honestly. There is no tactical advantage in burying a course you want beneath one you do not. The walk is through your own list, in your own order, against your own credits — nobody else's ranking interacts with yours at this stage.

Be generous with the length. The platform asks you to, in as many words: "We encourage to select as many courses as possible." A long list costs you nothing: what caps your spending is the credits you allocated, not the number of courses you named, so a tenth choice cannot make you overspend. What it buys you is somewhere to land. The walk reaches every entry on your list, which means the ones near the bottom are exactly where you end up when a course higher up turns out to be full or does not run.

Mandatory minimums

Some courses are labelled Mandatory Course. A registration window can attach a minimum spend to them — a number of credits you are expected to put into mandatory courses in that window.

You will see this on your home page, in the panel headed My Programs, on the card for each open registration window, underneath your credit balance. It reads one of two ways:

"For this period, we recommend spending at least 3 credits on mandatory courses"
"For this period, you must spend at least 3 credits on mandatory courses"

The wording is the whole difference. "We recommend" is advice from the program office; "you must" is an instruction from it.

What the platform does with the two is identical. It shows you the sentence and counts your spending against the figure. It does not stop you building a shortlist below the minimum, and it does not stop that shortlist being submitted when the window closes. An enforced minimum is something you are answerable to, not something the screen will apply on your behalf, so if you are under it, the person to speak to is your program officer.

Changing your mind

Everything in this flow is reversible until the closing date and time:

Remove a course from the shortlist page with the bin icon, then save.
Reorder with Move up and Move down, then save.
Change the allocated figure in the Allocate Credits panel or in the field at the top of the shortlist page — subject to the two limits above.

Nothing is charged, reserved or promised along the way. Your credits are not spent when you shortlist a course; they are spent when you are actually given a place.

After the deadline

Nothing you can see happens immediately. The program office works through the results and the courses gradually settle: a course that is going ahead is confirmed, a course that nobody can staff or fill is cancelled, and the classes you were given eventually appear under your courses.

Main list and waiting list explains exactly how the places are worked out, what a full course and an under-subscribed course mean for you, and what to do if you did not get what you asked for.