Every college student embarks on the semesterly challenge that is registering for classes; All each student really wants is to face minimal stress and craft an ideal schedule. Due to a number of unexpected hitches in the process, registration for Spring 2024 at Stevens was, unfortunately, an unecessarily stressful ordeal for many students.
Alongside the usual competition to get into certain courses or course sections, this year there were some unprecedented issues that students had to deal with. The Stute had the opportunity to speak with Jared Donnelly, the current Vice President of Academic Affairs of the Student Government Association (SGA), and Nick Smith, the Chair of the Academic Affairs Committee of the SGA, who provided insight on what went wrong during the registration process and the actions being taken to prevent this from happening again.
One issue was that upperclassmen Pinnacle Scholars improperly received priority in registration. First-year Pinnacles are given priority registration, meaning that they register on the first day of registration at the same time as in-season varsity athletes and students who have senior standing in credit. This has been done in order to ensure all first-year Pinnacle students can enroll in the Pinnacle Seminars necessary for them to fulfill their requirements. Since the seminars are usually meant to be taken their first year, first-year Pinnacles need to tailor the rest of their schedule around it, and that requires getting into certain course sections, which can best be done through priority registration. However, past their first year, Pinnacles aren’t supposed to retain this priority status. Donnelly spoke about this, stating, “From my current understanding, there was an issue when updating the registration information since moving to Workday. However, after conversations with the Office of Undergraduate Academics and the Registrar earlier this month, the problem seems to be fixed and should be integrated into new workflows so it shouldn’t arise again.”
Another issue specifically affected School of Business students, causing many of them to be unable to register for their school and major specific classes when registration opened. This was due to an error with some sort of safeguard put in place prohibiting students from registering for those classes. Lisa Cavanaugh of the School of Business Center for Student Success avidly communicated about this situation with students and provided guidance on what they can do to enroll in their necessary courses once the issue was resolved. Another School of Business-specific issue was that, for many of the core courses, there weren’t sufficient seats or sections to accommodate all students. Students registering after the priority date initially dealt with closed sections and waitlists and heavy competition for registration. While it is unclear why there weren’t enough spots compared to the number of students, working with the Registrar, more sections were created and the number of seats per section was increased for certain classes.
Yet another compounding factor was that students were generally not able to get into certain classes, particularly humanities courses. Like every school, the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) reserves much of their offered courses for the students within their school. This is done so that those students can have open access for getting into necessary courses in order to fulfill their requirements. While this is a very important step, it also meant that the competition for the unreserved spots was markedly higher. It also added the additional pressure for students scrambling to find another course to take when realizing the one they were initially interested in at HASS was closed or only open by waitlist.
All of these situations go to show how the registration process needs to be refined. While there will always be conflicts, many of the problems faced by students this time around created unnecessary stress for students, academic advisors, and others in the process alike. Smith shares his views on this, stating, “Something needs to be done to ensure there is a clearer process going forward, or students need to be communicated to about all of these new safeguards that were put in place (reserved seats, waitlists, etc) so that we can plan better when we schedule next year.” He also explained that a top priority of the SGA is to work on this with the Office of Undergraduate Academics to ensure that registration for future semesters is easier and runs more smoothly, for the good of students and staff alike.
