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St. Cloud State University
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Commentary
Class need offsets new procedures
Published:
Monday, April 19, 2004
Each of SCSU's almost 16,000 students have a multitude of different pressures and demands in their lives.
But once each fall and once each spring, almost all of them share a common moment of panic.
It's called registration.
Registration has come far from the days when most of SCSU students' parents were in college. Gone are the huge rooms and long lines of registration days of yore. Today's computerized system lets students add and drop classes with a few strokes of the keyboard and clicks of a mouse.
That, certainly, is progress. But despite higher education's great work to make class registration more efficient, the heart-pounding hysteria of the process continues to dog students each semester.
Registration means students with not enough credits must fight to get into the classes they need. Registration means class sizes never seem big enough. Registration means crashed computer systems, students double-holding seats and a mad scramble to make it to a computer in time for the holy allotted registration hour.
SCSU's administrators and advisers should be credited for at least being aware of these problems. Unfortunately, under the current registration setup, the administration can do little about them.
Server problems may eventually be fixed; we will all look forward to a registration day where the online registration system actually works at peak times. But until state funding of higher education increases, the not-enough-seats-and-classes problem is not going away. And the university admits that though it has policies against students holding multiple seats in class, or holding seats in classes they do not plan to take for friends, it is essentially powerless to stop double holds.
The cycle is vicious and feeds upon itself; students fear they will not be able to register for some classes, so they resort to cutthroat tactics to get the classes they require. Consequently, classes fill faster, demand increasingly surpasses availability and in the end, many students are forced out of the schedules they desperately need.
A new registration system that Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) has developed would put a stop to many students taking liberties with registration. The system would prevent unauthorized double holds and any other registration practice that appears suspicious.
But even if loopholes are removed from the current registration system, the underlying problem of not enough seats in not enough classes remains.
MnSCU should not consider implementing its new registration system at its schools until it has come up with a plan to handle increased student demand for classes.
Students' and taxpayers' money is better spent first on adding seats and sections. More sophisticated computer technology should come only after the fundamental problems are resolved.
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