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Registration process frustrates
 Media Credit: Ashley Preste Academic Advisor Mike Sharp offers registration advice to SCSU student Pleasant Massaquoi. The Advising Center is located on the second floor of Centennial Hall.
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More than a week into registration, advisers are busy, classes are filling and some students are frustrated.
In the past few years, frustrated students and limited class availability seem to be recurring trends.
SCSU provost Michael Spitzer works with departments and deans to help guide and facilitate class availability and potential seat numbers.
"We try to anticipate how many students will take which courses," he said. "Some departments have very high demand."
As a result, classes fill up quickly. Budget constraints have also attributed to fewer classes and professors, Spitzer said.
"There is a real limitation on our funding, so we need to shift resources," he said. "One of the things we noticed is that we need to be certain we have enough seats for general education and core classes."
As a first-year student and undeclared major, Gary Houseman finds the registration system troubling. It's hard to register when you are last on the list, he said.
"If you don't have enough credits, usually your class is filled, so you have to pick other ones," he said. "Last semester I had to talk to a few teachers about getting into their class and switch my schedule around the first week of school."
Although undeclared majors and first-year students face registration woes, upperclassmen and admitted majors encounter similar problems.
Fourth-year student Brie Adams said she has personally witnessed upperclassmen run into problems of class sizes and availability.
"I think it is horrible if you don't have enough credits that you can't get the classes that you want," she said. "There aren't enough classes for what the students need."
Administrators recognize registration difficulties and hope to find a remedy soon, Director of Registration Debbie Tamte-Horan said.
"I do know that this topic is high on everyone's list, up to and including the president," she said. "Whether or not they will be 100 percent successful might be a little too much to ask."
Some departments have more trouble than others, she said.
"There are particular majors that have more difficulties than others," Tamte-Horan said. "It becomes a balancing act."
While Tamte-Horan would like to help students with problems they encounter, she said there is only so much she can do.
"Our role is to carry out the rules," she said. "Sometimes that means we make some people unhappy."
System crash
On top of a lack of class availability, the SCSU computer registration system crashed last semester and during summer registration a few weeks ago, resulting in a complete outage of the system.
During that time, students could not access the system. Because new allotments of students are slatted to register every hour, the crash caused a significant backlog.
"The servers are sensitive pieces of equipment," Tamte-Horan said. "They have been trying to update the computers."
After talking to various different sources, she believes that the outages may have been a result of construction last summer. Different cables were moved and could have been fractured, she said. MnSCU is investigating and working to remedy the problem for the future.
Spitzer also said that SCSU added more bandwidth to the computer system so more people can log on at one time.
"Unfortunately, I cannot predict whether there will be a crash (this semester)," Tamte-Horan said. "But, I hope it doesn't happen."
Advising
By directly dealing with students in their class selection process, advisers see the impact and witness obstacles students face during registration.
By utilizing the advising center, students can efficiently register and avoid making class selection mistakes, said Steve Klepetar, director of advising.
"We need to make sure that students take advantage of the registration matrix as soon as possible," Klepetar said. "Students also need to plan alternatives and exhaust all avenues."
Klepetar views registration as a two-level problem.
"It's a problem for freshmen because they can't get into a class and it can be frustrating," he said. "But we also want the upper level student to not be delayed because they have been here for a while."
Even though good advising can guide a student in the right direction, there are no guarantees everyone will be happy.
"Even if students get good advising, there still is a chance that classes will be full," Klepetar said.
The education and business departments try to adopt their own helpful methods to assist students because they acknowledge students will inevitably face registration problems.
MBA undergraduate programs director Kerry Marrer said that the business department posts signs around the building to remind students to come in for help.
"We always want to make it better, we want it to be student friendly and we think we have a pretty smooth system right now," she said. "We are always open and if students have questions, we want them to come back in and ask."
Before registration and a few weeks into it, the education department hosts advising sessions Wednesday and Thursday nights from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Adviser and professor of education Stephen Hornstein offered a hopeful piece of advice to education majors.
"Students who get advised early can get out in four years."
Writen by Nick Hanson & Mike Doyle
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