After a wobbly start to class registration for next semester, the Office of the University Registrar has been working with the Office of Information Technology and the Student Information Services and Systems Office to ensure a smoother registration process from here on out.
Prior to and during class registration, which started Oct. 29 for graduate and professional students and Oct. 31 for undergraduates, students reported a number of difficulties ranging from losing classes that had been placed in their online bookbags to losing access to ACES while they were attempting to enroll.
University Registrar Bruce Cunningham said he was aware of difficulties with registration and that his office and OIT have been addressing the problems as they have been identified.
"[OIT] spent a great deal of time last week trying to find the cause of these problems, correcting them and then testing to see if these fixes had worked," Cunningham said. "The good news is that these fixes did work, but other problems came up, so students still experienced some difficulties."
Cunningham said that by Friday morning, registration problems were limited to only a handful of students. On Friday morning, he said, 406 seniors enrolled within the first five minutes the registration window was open. By 7:30 a.m., 66 percent of those eligible for the senior window had enrolled, and by the end of the day 91 percent of eligible students had enrolled.
"These numbers are all slightly ahead of the comparable numbers from last year's spring senior window," he said. "We received trouble reports in our office and at the OIT Help Desk from about 25 to 30 students early Friday morning. Of those, less than half of them indicated that they felt they had been unable to obtain a seat in a needed class because of system troubles."
Still, Cunningham said he was concerned about the impact of registration problems, even on a few students. "The way I see it, if only one student experienced problems, that is one too many," he said.
Senior Chelsea Stine was among those who experienced difficulties when trying to register Friday morning.
"When I would try to enroll after finally getting my bookbag on the screen, it would go to an error page and I would have to log in all over again," Stine said. "I finally figured out to enroll in my classes one by one in order to get the registration through, but by then I was already eighteenth on the waiting list for one of the classes I wanted and eighth for another."
Cunningham said the registrar's office has been working to assist students who were precluded from enrolling in classes due to system glitches.
"We have several system logs and other information sources that tell us when someone was in the system, so we can tell when someone was blocked from obtaining a class because of the system problems," he said. "In those cases we are working with departments to try to help them get what they need. We can't do that in all cases, but so far the departments have been very helpful in trying to resolve these problems."
SISS Director Kathy Pfeiffer said the University has also been responding to people who have called OIT or the registrar's office about problems with their registration. Several students noted, however, that the OIT help line was busy when they tried to call.
Cunningham said there are not any specific instructions students can follow to ensure that they are not logged out during registration, although he recommended using the "Enroll All" button instead of registering for classes one by one.
"The new queuing mechanism treats each enrollment request as a separate request, and only one request per student is allowed to be active," he said, noting that an "Enroll All" request is considered as one request. "From what we can tell so far, with the exception of a few individuals whose requests got caught in a server problem on Friday morning, the requests were saved in the queue even when the entire ACES system bogged down that morning, and they were still processed in order, even though it took longer to process them than OIT had expected."
Chris Meyer, director of application and database services for OIT, said many of Friday's difficulties stemmed from the low configuration of a parameter setting in the University's Oracle database--a problem OIT fixed by increasing the number of processes available within Oracle from 500 to 1,500. Meyer said OIT also addressed the system's sluggishness.
Problems with registration Monday morning, the first window for juniors, stemmed from the inadvertent introduction of a bug when OIT was dealing with Friday's problems. This, too, has been fixed, Meyer said.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.