Registration should be improved

4/10/13 7:00pm

 

The Thresher believes the fall 2013 registration cycle has gone fairly smoothly, with no major mishaps and the ESTHER registration system functioning properly. Of the 1,113 undergraduate level class sections students inputted into their ESTHER Course Registration Planners, 213 sections were filled to capacity and experienced high demand, according to Registrar David Tenney. 

The Thresher believes this statistic is slightly misleading. While it demonstrates that only a small portion of the total undergraduate-level courses experienced high demand, this statistic does not reflect many students' experiences with registration since many of these maxed-out courses are concentrated within a few major departments, specifically economics and psychology (see story, p. 1). The statistic includes upper-level seminar courses that may be maxed-out due to a low cap rather than inadequate resources to accommodate high demand. 

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Because some majors have more specific requirements than others, the Thresher believes it would be beneficial for students of a certain major to have priority over other students when getting into classes within their department. However, we acknowledge that this might be difficult to implement logistically and fairly, and that some students might exploit the prioritization. The Thresher acknowledges that issues relating to class availability must not be conflated with the registration system itself, which largely runs smoothly. 

Some rising seniors were not able to initially register successfully for a Lifetime Physical Activity Program course, while other rising seniors, who had already taken an LPAP and are taking another LPAP as an elective, could successfully register. A minor change that could facilitate the registration process would be to prioritize, within seniors, those who have not previously taken any LPAPs and to cap the total number of LPAPs students are allowed to take. 

Currently, the Course Registration Planner only provides information on the number of students who have placed a course in their planner as a first choice to students who have also selected a course as their first choice. Making this same information available when students list a course as an alternate would help students choose alternate courses more effectively. 

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