With pre-registration complete and preliminary schedules posted in student e-portfolios, the Registrar’s Office is finally seeing the results of its work on the new class registration system.
“We’re really pleased,” said University Registrar Anna van der Burg. “The objective here was to be fair, and to give students the most classes. We think it went really well.”
According to van der Burg, 86 percent of participating students received their first choice and 76 percent of participants received three or more full-credit courses.
Students who did not receive full schedules were able to re-enter the system early this week to add classes with available seats or drop undesired reserved courses. All students will be able to make schedule adjustments starting Wednesday.
The adjustment period will end this Friday, and students will receive an updated schedule on May 10, the day after classes end. Remaining ranked drop/add requests will reappear during the drop/add period in September.
The new logarithm-based system was designed to replace the click system, which required students to click bookmarked links for classes during scheduled computer lab times.
“We can measure demand now,” van der Burg said. “We can really say how many students selected a course as their first choice. With the other system, we had no way to find that data.”
van der Burg hopes that the new system will end the case of seniors who graduate without getting into a coveted class after multiple attempts.
“If you’ve made [a class] your first choice this semester and you didn’t get it, when you go to select it again next semester you’ll get priority,” van der Burg said. “We will count your ranked requests from pre-registration as well as the ranked enrollment requests you submit during drop/add.”
She acknowledged that the two-column lineage of Path A and Path B confused both students and advisors. The two columns were designed to answer complaints that the new system would not offer students the same flexibility as the click system.
“I think some students didn’t realize that there could be overlap between the two columns, and that it didn’t have to be a completely different set of courses,” said Assistant Registrar Heather Alderfer.
Another element that van der Burg and Alderfer hope to improve is confusion over time conflicts. Even though the program would never schedule students for overlapping classes, the pre-registration period allowed students to add classes that conflicted.
“The system doesn’t prevent you from entering courses that have time conflicts in the plan, because that’s a plan, not a final schedule,” van der Burg said.
Alderfer also admitted that many students didn’t realize the flexibility of classes with multiple sections. While students could choose specific sections, there was also an option to take any section that fit into a schedule.
“You’d see these big section classes that had eight or nine sections, and everyone was all bunched up in section one,” Alderfer said. “We really have to stress that flexibility [for sections] in the future.”
In addition, the Registrar’s Office plans to better situate the scheduling of pre-registration in the academic calendar.
“We don’t want it to overlap with the housing lottery for students, and we don’t want it to overlap for faculty who are reading theses, as it did this first time,” Alderfer said.
Alderfer and van der Burg encourage student feedback on the new system, as does Steve Machuga, director of administrative systems for ITS.
“We’re very interested in how the students feel [about the system] and if it gave them an equitable and fair selection,” Machuga said. “Based on our results, we think it has.”
Student reaction to the new system seemed to echo his claim.
“It was a little stressful having to learn a new system after I had the other one down, but it worked really well for me,” said Meredith Katz ’07.
“I got all my classes, which was cool, but they need to add more boxes for half credit classes,” said Michael Lubrano ’09. “I would have been screwed if I hadn’t gotten my first choice.”
Susan Gerhardt ’09 found less success.
“I only received two classes, and all the others are full,” she said. “Looks like I’ll be filling up on Phys Ed classes.”
Leave a Reply