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Registration program slow, inadequate

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by Ammar Al Marzouqi

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

With the registration dates for the summer and fall semesters approaching, the Registrar’s Office at the University of Wisconsin finalized the elimination of the previous web-based system. This means class timetables for summer 2008 and fall 2008 will not be available in a webpage format, and students will be forced to use the new and “improved” Integrated Student Information System. Yet, with its many inadequacies and its inherent slowness, the registrar’s decision to eliminate the web-based system and force students to use ISIS was entirely unwise and premature.

To begin, the old HTML-based system, which relied on a series of webpages, is considerably faster than the new ISIS. Not only is the new system always slow, but it is much easier to overwhelm than the HTML version during the peak registration period. I doubt there is a student who hasn’t experienced the frustration of staring at ISIS’s loading page for a long period of time while it performs what should be a simple task for such an “advanced” system. Even UW registrar Joanne Berg acknowledged that the system is slow, and told The Badger Herald the Registrar’s Office has “a lot of programmers working on how to make it faster.”

Furthermore, many aspects of ISIS are obviously incomplete. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve reached a virtual dead-end in the so-called homepage, which is curiously not the main Student Center page, and had no way to go back to the Student Center main menu but to close and reopen the entire system. The section that displays holds is so small it’s almost unnoticeable, and since the Registrar’s Office — for some unknown reason — does not inform students of holds on their records, a hold can easily go unnoticed until it’s registration time. By then it’s too late.

Another frustrating aspect of ISIS is the lack of any form of back or forward links on many of its pages. For example, if a student chooses a lecture and a discussion but then changes his or her mind, he or she has no way of going back to their search and instead has to start a whole new one.

Also, the old web-based system enabled students to check open and closed sections within seconds. While the ISIS’s multi-step program not only takes an ungodly amount of time in comparison to the old system, it also only enables a student to choose one section at a time to add to his or her wish list to keep track of whether it’s open or closed. This is extremely frustrating, especially when taking into account courses with multiple lectures and discussions that open and close almost daily during registration time.

Despite all its inadequacies, it seems the registrar’s office still views the ISIS as “a better product,” according to Ms. Berg — an overstatement to say the least. Another reason cited by Ms. Berg for the elimination of the web-based schedule is that the university cannot afford to keep both systems. I won’t claim to know anything about the internal financial matters of the Registrar’s Office, but I can’t help but wonder, is the money the university saved worth the frustration of the students, especially when the aim of this entire move is to better serve them?

As it stands today, ISIS is obviously inferior to the old system, and the registrar’s decision to discontinue the old system is unwise and premature. If the university wants to know what services not to cut during this budget crunch, make DoIt priority No. 1. UW needs to restore the web-based timetable until ISIS becomes a complete and adequate product.

Ammar Al Marzouqi (aalmarzouqi@wisc.edu) is a freshman majoring in computer engineering.

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Anonymous (April 2, 2008 @ 10:42am):

Anmar, Im certainly no computer expert and it seems to me that you know much more about them than I do. But I can help you out with one thing that you complained about in this piece:

"Another frustrating aspect of ISIS is the lack of any form of back or forward links on many of its pages. For example, if a student chooses a lecture and a discussion but then changes his or her mind, he or she has no way of going back to their search and instead has to start a whole new one."

To easy your utter frustration, there are two options here:

1. Simply click "Return to Course List"
or
2. Right-click and select "Back"

freshmen...

Anonymous (April 2, 2008 @ 3:33pm):

What he means, 10:42, is that the code they use effectively breaks the functionality of the "back" and "forward" buttons on your web browser. (Right-click and selecting "back" or hitting backspace is equivalent to using the back button.)

People should not design web pages (i.e. ISIS) that disallow basic browser actions.

Anonymous (April 2, 2008 @ 5:53pm):

Ok, as I said I dont understand it much. But it definitely DOES work to right click and hit "back" to go back a page.

Anonymous (April 3, 2008 @ 12:33am):

I agree. The new system is a joke. Registering for classes is SO hard when you can't see how many spaces are left in a section and try to get into one that has more spaces left. I got totally screwed over for my summer courses that way and I can only have nightmares about what's going to happen with my fall registration.

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