MOST students would agree that ISIS is something like the bastard child of the McDonald's drive through window radio and an ATM machine, but complaining isn't getting students anywhere. The apparent total meltdown of the system Monday is the last straw for the outdated system. The University may have a budget crisis and money is tight, but education starts with course enrollment and a streamlined system is long overdue. Under the current circumstances, putting everybody into a room and letting them fight for placement is looking very tempting.
The most damaging aspect of the system is overlooked and completely correctable by a reassessed system -- the intense horserace of enrollment. Area and major requirements, courses with tiny enrollments, specific discussion sections and courses taught by popular professors can fill up pretty quickly and there is nothing that can be done about it. With student entrance times stacked on top of each other in a short period of time and the rapidity of courses filling up, everybody has to be at a computer and ready to enter the second their enrollment time arrives. Missing a class or a meeting in order to enroll for next semester is necessary because signing up 30 minutes late can make a big difference in getting the right courses. And then when all the classes a student wants have filled, there is a mad dash through the Course Offering Directory to find a class that isn't filled as of 6:15 a.m. As a result, students spend more time on the overburdened system and others cannot log on.
Although there is no way to stem the tide of classes filling up, everybody who isn't an Echols Scholar will have less of a race if student entrance times are spread out. Although the actual process will take longer overall, students won't have to skip classes and worry about being at a computer the second their time comes.
With more entrance times staggered over a long period, students can log in with fewer people overloading the system and can proceed without racing. By staggering the enrollment times there will be fewer user requests at any given time and the system will be less prone to locking out students and crashing. While the Registrar's Office would have logistical problems in making registration week longer, the administration should find a way to make it work.
Additionally, a formal waiting list has become a necessity. With dwindling resources and departing faculty, waiting lists are getting longer. As it currently stands, a student wishing to get into a popular and already full course can get it only by the luck of attempting to add the course immediately after someone else has dropped it. This process also allows for "holding" as a person with an early enrollment time picks up a class for a friend and then coordinates their drop with their friend's add. ISIS can be inefficient and obnoxious, but the way full classes are filled is blatantly unfair to everybody. Students should be able to add themselves to waiting lists for full classes and when someone drops a class, the system automatically pulls someone from the list.
At other schools, students finding themselves locked out of classes can immediately add themselves to computerized waiting lists. The system allows a maximum number of waiting list placements to prevent a student from overloading lists and also allows students to keep track of their number as students above them dropped out or got into the class. Rather than e-mailing a request to a professor, the system automatically fills the class with students from the list. While professors could still make exceptions for majors, fourth years and others, such a system at the University certainly would take the unnecessary burden of enrollment off the faculty and provide a more orderly system for enrolling.
With its use of numeric codes, ISIS is clearly a relic of the days of telephone registration. Probably a well-designed system for the 1980s, it is a system designed using older Internet technology and its format makes the process tedious and more complicated than it needs to be. Opening two windows for registration slows down the computer and leads to more time spent on ISIS, more users and more logjam. And the use of code numbers rather than course names comes from the days of exclusive dialing into the system from touch tone phones.
Course enrollment would be much easier if ISIS included menus with course numbers and course names that students could merely click on to select. Registering for Advanced Logic would not be confused with Advanced Yoga when there are no five digit codes to type. Course selection should look like finding books on Amazon.com instead of the ridiculous back and forth between the COD and ISIS.
Like clockwork, enrollment at the end of every semester elicits anger and frustration as students whine about ISIS. The administration must finally make a proactive move and do something to create a new system. Each passing week brings more doom and gloom to the financial status of the University, but course enrollment is the starting point for education and desperately in need of overhaul. The University seriously needs to emulate the systems of other schools and formulate a new system because even staggering entrance times and automatic waiting lists can't save the sinking ship that is the S.S. ISIS.
(Brad Cohen's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at bcohen@cavalierdaily.com.)
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