MY ROOMMATE, a transfer student from Boston University, put it best: "This really sucks." He was, of course, talking about ISIS, the proverbial elephant in the room, one of the first things everyone complains about, yet very few students have taken action to amend. The truth is that while the University provides its students with incredible advantages, ISIS is an obsolete, sub-par system that fails to meet with the needs of our 18,000-plus students.
To understand ISIS's inadequacies, it is important to first understand ISIS's origin. According to Associate Registrar Robert LeHeup, ISIS is an "old-style mainframe system, created in the late 1980s" and brought to life in 1991. In the 1980s, students would add and drop classes through scantron forms in person at University Hall, because unlike today, students could not connect to ISIS directly. Thus, ISIS Online, or the ISIS we have all come to know and curse, is simply a Web interface designed to connect students to the original mainframe application. The mainframe system, popular for confusing first years by actually having office hours, needs to be shut down nightly in order for maintenance and updates to take place, thus explaining its time limitations. This system, which should be superannuated and replaced by Internet-age technology, is still in place here at our University.
The setup of our beloved ISIS has many implications. First of all, high volumes of visitors will slow down ISIS significantly more than systems at other schools. In fact, the number of visitors matters so much that, according to LeHeup, "during the final registration period, all other day-time activities are suspended (except for printing transcripts), so all the other University users are shut out for the 10 days." The school actually shuts down all other activities in a feeble attempt to stop the system from giving students the all too familiar "number of users exceeded" error. Second, students will have to continue to suffer office hours for ISIS. If left standing, students can only hope that the office hours increase, but completely abolishing them would require drastic measures.Third, there is little hope that the functions of ISIS will be broadened.Given that the University's goal is minimizing ISIS visitors at any given time, it is highly unlikely that they will integrate the course offering directory to ISIS, thus making it still necessary for students to shuffle among Web sites when trying to sign up for classes.
Clearly the system that my fellow students and I are being forced to use is inconvenient, obsolete and inferior. A University as prestigious as ours should not only have an updated system, but should have one superior to those of competing schools. Currently, the approach to the problem has been small and basically insignificant changes to speed up the current system.But this is like buying a new muffler for a two-cylinder car and expecting its speed to be satisfactory. The solution instead, is to buy a new and better car altogether, and in this case, to completely replace ISIS with an Internet-age student information system. A new system would solve all of the problems ISIS now faces -- high volumes of visitors would have much less of an impact on the overall process, restricted hours would become a relic of the past and the updated system would offer many convenient and necessary options for students.
The Registrar's Office claims that the University is inching toward such a plan, but we students do not have time for their inching. Already a new basketball court is being built, a new Observatory Hill dining hall is almost done and other random construction can be seen all around Grounds, so why should the construction not extend to our Internet system? The financial obstacles do, admittedly, pose a problem to such a goal, but they should not stop students from being offered what they deserve, and what students at other colleges get. A system so inferior at the top-ranked public university in the country is not acceptable.Students should take action beginning with Student Council. Furthermore, a petition needs to be put on the student ballot calling for a replacement system. At the very least, people should redirect their complaints about ISIS away from their friends and towards ITC, sending a clear and simple message: This fine university can do better, and we should thus strive to do so.
Sina Kian's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at skian@cavalierdaily.com.
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