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Scheduling Problems Again

Daniel Caccavale

Many of us have been in some of these situations:  the class you wish to sign up for is cancelled due to lack of enrollment and now you need a new one; you have apparently been taking the wrong classes and now can’t graduate on tim; or you need one more class to graduate and you never even knew it existed and can’t graduate until next semester. This trend has been growing on campus lately, but why?

For those of you who are new to the campus, a few years ago students used to have to meet with academic advisors personally to register for their next semester classes. Their advisors would let them know what classes to take and when, so they could graduate on time, and then just register for them without any problem. But this is the age of technology and making things simple. To make the lives of the advisors a little easier and less stressful, and so that students have a little more control over what classes to take, everything went electronic in 2009 and now we register online, on our own, every semester.

But how much easier is it really? Now that it’s up to the students to register themselves for classes, make sure they clarify their course load with their advisors, and to make sure they are on top of all their requirements, students have a few choices. One is to make sure to meet with their advisors prior to the registration date and check that they are planning to take the right classes. The second option is to just wing it. This could lead to an increase in the number of students forgetting about a class they need to take, and an increase in students being held back from graduation for a semester.

Well, not everything is the fault of technology. A lot of students register for the right class, and then two weeks before the class is set to begin they get a call saying that it has been cancelled since not enough people registered for it. This causes a major issue because a lot of those classes are mandatory for people’s majors and now need to be pushed back to a different semester. In many cases an alternative can be provided but if it can’t, those people can’t graduate on time if it is during their senior year and it is the only class left they need to take.

While it is true that it is easier to register online by ourselves, it may not be practical due to some of the complications that come with it. Would it solve the problem if we switched back to the old ways? Hard to tell, but we do know the new way has some flaws and difficulties.

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