The University released its listing of courses for the spring semester Friday through the Student Information System - bringing to the fore some community members' continued concerns about the course registration process.
The next semester offers students an array of classes from which to choose, with the College currently scheduled to offer 4,124 class sections on Grounds, University Assoc. Registrar Jonathan Helm said. The Architecture School will offer 150; the Commerce School will offer 132; the Education School will offer 384; the Engineering School will offer 492; the Darden School will offer 97; the Law School will offer 222; the Batten School will offer eight; the Medical School will offer 47; the Nursing School will offer 155; and the University will offer 71 additional first-year seminars and interdisciplinary courses.
The spring semester also will present University officials with another test of the efficiency of SIS, the effectiveness of which has been debated by students and faculty members. Physics Prof. Louis Bloomfield became so fed up with SIS that he started his own list of classes offered at the University in April.
"I was motivated to create the listing out of the frustration with SIS during lower division advising," Bloomfield said. "Advisers were having trouble finding classes due to the inflexibility of the system. It is so poorly designed and implemented that the people who wrote the code should be embarrassed by it."
Bloomfield cited the system's inaccessibility to outsiders and lack of information about some courses as faults. "How can they expect advisers to talk about courses that have no description?" he said. "While some titles are self-explanatory, in a lot of cases, students just have to make blind judgments."
Many students across Grounds echoed similar views. "I'm used to going in loops over the same path," said second-year College student Jack Roebuck, a University Transit Service bus driver, "but SIS overdoes it. It has too many complications for simple tasks." Second-year College student Kyle Gibson agreed, adding that he was almost dropped from a course because he tried to switch discussion sections.
"I'm happy for those who like this new system," he said, "but I feel like ISIS was one of the best student information systems of all time."
The complaints of faculty and students, however, have not fallen on deaf ears. Carole Horwitz, director of Communications for Student Systems Project, pointed out that many recent enhancements to SIS were made to benefit users. Four of these changes were made solely to assist in during the spring 2010 enrollment phase. These modifications include a longer time-out period from 20 to 35 minutes, class search set to view all, bolded topic names and inclusion of 5000-level classes in undergraduate career searches.
Additionally, a slight reorganization of the SIS Portal to make it easier to find help guides and tutorials is scheduled for next week, she said. Tips for spring enrollment also will be disseminated and can be accessed on the SIS Web site.
"It would be great if they got their act together," Bloomfield said. "This is an educational institute and SIS is impeding that process. I will keep running my system because my first priority is the faculty and students. They won't squelch my system."
Whether these changes will satisfy the problems users face will be put to the test soon, as students begin scheduling for the spring semester Nov. 9.
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