The $47 million Student Information System was implemented at the University nearly a year ago to streamline student information and to improve the course registration system, said Carole Horwitz, director of communications for the Student Systems Project. Many students and faculty members, though, still consider it more of an annoyance than a technological advancement.
The case against the system
Among the least popular features of SIS is the way it handles waiting lists.
"The waiting list system is barely functional and barely adequate," Physics Prof. Louis Bloomfield said. "To get students in the labs, there may be 15 sections and there's no way to feed the students into the system strategically. They have to go on waiting list for each individual section and students can't drop one lab without dropping the entire course."
These problems often result from the order in which students are assigned to waiting lists, said Alexis Andres, assistant dean for Student Operations and Systems. It is also common for students to have negative holds or time conflicts that prevent the system from automatically enrolling them in the course, he said.
"If you're trying to get into a discussion that is full, you're not going to be able to get in and you'll lose your spot on waiting list on the lecture because you have to submit that [combined] request from the beginning," Andres said. "There are lots of students before you who chose that same combination."
Students often do not know the difference between an automatic waiting list system and a restricted, instructor-permission class, and course action forms can make the course registration even more frustrating, Andres said.
"In some situations, professors sign course action forms, which is detrimental to the students using the waiting list," she said. "The course action form is taking spots that would be taking students on the waiting list."
But even when students manage to enroll in and complete classes, SIS sometimes does not recognize that they have taken the course. Fourth-year Engineering Student Iberedem Ekure said he has noticed that SIS often overlooks credits that contribute toward majors, especially when those courses belong to different departments.
"SIS did not correctly perform my electrical engineering academic audit," Ekure said. "It listed requirements I had fulfilled as [if they were still] outstanding and dumped classes that I took [as electives] that don't count toward any requirements box."
The glitch is especially disconcerting to those with majors or minors from two different schools or departments, Ekure said.
"Another friend who is both in the Engineering and Commerce Schools had his engineering major listed as a minor on SIS, preventing him from doing an academic audit for his engineering program," Ekure said.
Transfer students run into roadblocks with their credits, as well. Second-year Nursing student Bridget Vaughn, who transferred to the University from James Madison University, said she had a particularly hard time with SIS to organize her transfer credits.
Alleviating problems with the waiting list and academic auditing systems is Student Operations and Systems' top priority, Andres said, adding that fourth-year students with pressing academic audit issues should come to the department's office to address their problems as soon as possible.
It is not only students, however, who have encountered problems with the system. Physics Prof. Craig Dukes said he and a number of faculty members had great difficulty entering grades through SIS this past semester.
"For a lab with 465 students, it was really a mess," he said. "It was difficult to even know if the correct grades were up for students because we got error messages ... Having to go through that for every student, one by one, with a slow piece of software ... takes forever."
Assoc. Media Studies Prof. Siva Vaidhyanathan said the system has proven to be inefficient when it comes to advising sessions with students, as well.
"The interface itself is state-of-the-art for about 1993," Vaidhyanathan said. "It's profoundly unhelpful. When doing advising, it's terribly confusing to determine which screen means what. Too much information rolls out on one particular screen and you have to scroll down to the end to do basic advising audits."
Moreover, SIS presents course descriptions in a condensed format that could be detrimental for both students and faculty, Bloomfield said.
"SIS is inferior to ISIS," he said. "Academics evolve with time, so faculty who want to teach a new topic or the most recent thing they're interested in ... have trouble attracting an audience because the only thing they can put out there that students can see ... is a title, and even that is hard to get to show up in SIS."
He noted that this may hinder new faculty members from establishing themselves and filling up courses.
"The chances that a student will get far enough along in the system to find the class and recognize it as something that might interest them is so low," he said, "that these innovative classes are under-subscribed and run the risk of failing and collapsing."
Going with the flow?
Andres - who is also a University alumna - said she understands how much of a struggle it can be for students to adjust to a new system but noted that many of the University's peer institutions - including the University of Michigan, James Madison University and Stanford University - use the same system.
"This is not something that somebody thought of one evening and thought to implement the next day," Andres said. "A lot of people and effort went into making the decision."\nVaughn, who transferred to the University from JMU in the fall, said the two systems are essentially the same.
Just because other universities use the same system, however, does not make it a good one, JMU sophomore Jordan Gilmore said. Students there have had similar complaints about their university's "e-campus," Gilmore said, adding that she personally finds the search interface cumbersome.
"You first find the class you need, then you add it to your 'shopping cart,' then you have to click 'checkout' and then there is one last step to confirm your registration," she said. "If you know that there are three steps total, it isn't a big deal, but I know a lot of freshmen who add a class to their cart, and by the time they realize that they're not done, some of their classes have filled up."
The system, however, does have convenient aspects, she said. For example, it allows students to set up their preliminary schedules before their assigned registration periods.
Falling short of advertised expectations?
"In theory, SIS is supposed to integrate all the essential functions for managing student enrollment, grades and degree audits ... And it's supposed to work well with Collab, but at this point, it's not really useful for any of those things," Vaidhyanathan said. "It's built badly from the bolts up."
Frustrated with SIS, Bloomfield created his own schedule of courses as an alternative, which has grown in popularity with both faculty and students since its debut last year.
"It presents everything in a concise, readable format, instead of a sort of industrial format," Bloomfield said. "It's fast, you can bookmark pages - and you can have more than one page open at once."\nDukes, who uses Bloomfeld's unofficial system instead of SIS, said he did not see the necessity of overhauling the old system.
"We didn't see huge problems with the old system, or problems that couldn't be tweaked for a lot less than what this new system cost," he said. "$50 million ... That's a huge amount money for a system that just isn't very good."
Vaidhyanathan echoed Dukes' sentiments and noted that current faculty and staff members at the University possibly could have built a better system that was truly tailored to the unique needs of the University.
"Lou Bloomfield created Lou's List by doing some simple coding that allows his Web site to scrape data from SIS a couple of times a day and offers a user-friendly, quick view of which classes are open," Vaidhyanathan said. "Why couldn't we actually pay someone here to do that?
But a system built and implemented by individual universities is not the norm, Horwitz said. It is neither efficient nor desirable to have a team of system designers at each university, as it would be difficult to adapt to yearly changes in restrictions from the state and federal government. Systems available on the market, meanwhile, streamline student information and make it accessible to various departments, from enrollment to finances, she added.
"All universities are shifting away from these homemade systems into these enterprise systems," Horwitz said. "They give you the flexibility to build the system according to needs of the University ... You get those upgrades from the vendor."
Nevertheless, Vaidyanathan said he thinks the system is neither worth the headache nor the money.
"It's not worth a dime," Vaidhyanathan said. "We really should get that money back. I've looked at six universities, and this is by far the worst student system I've ever seen."
More of an impediment than an innovation?
"We basically have to conform to it because it won't conform to us - that's the big, macro problem," Vaidhyanathan said.
He also contrasted SIS' shortcomings with Collab's successes, though Collab does have its own faults, he said.
"The great thing about Collab is that people at U.Va. can go under the hood and fix [problems] when we ask them," Vaidhyanathan said. "SIS is supposedly designed to actually serve the needs of the University community and be flexible and adaptable because things change. If in 2009 and 2010 we're just now getting used to this 1993 user interface, how many changes will we have to go through in 10 years? It's a terribly backward system."
Vaidhyanathan said the system simply does not cater to the needs of this or any university.
"It's not saving anyone any time," Vaidhyanathan said. "Every time that we complain about an issue, we're told SIS can't do that, or SIS wasn't designed for that, and we can't change that now, which makes me wonder: Who's in charge here, the computer or the university?"
Bloomfield expressed similar sentiments about the rigidity of the system.
"[SIS is] meant for a world in which nothing evolves and nothing changes, and people take the same classes year-in and year-out and don't want to go shopping for new classes," Bloomfield said. "It's more suitable for a high school where you're a 10th grader and you're going to take 10th grade English, math and social studies, but at a research university, it's just a huge impediment to innovation."
Easing the frustrations
But Horwitz's office spent a year researching the systems available and SIS proved best able to meet the requirements of the University, she said. These needs were defined by staff, faculty and students in random surveys, Horwitz said, and SIS seemed more capable than any other system on the market.
Less than one-third of the survey pool responded, however. About 670 students of the 2,500 that were surveyed responded to the Office of Institutional Assessment and Studies, she said.\n"It was over the holidays, so students were probably less likely to respond," she added.
Horwitz's office organized drop-in sessions at Newcomb Hall and various libraries on Grounds prior to SIS' launch to ease the transition from ISIS, Andres said, but attendance was poor. Moreover, there are several online resources that address questions about the system, but many students may be unaware of them, she said. Additionally, both Horwitz and Andres emphasized that they are working closely with an advisory group of students from all of the University's schools to identify and prioritize areas for improvement.
"The SIS Advisory Group is ... dedicating many hours to helping us identify and prioritize enhancements that will make SIS work better in areas that need improvement," Horwitz said. "The University spent over a year, engaging hundreds of people in the University community ... Hundreds of people continued to work with the project over the years to set up and test the system to meet needs specific to U.Va. This is a process that continues."
As a result, the Student Systems Project still is working to make SIS fit the University, Andres said, noting that feedback and user concerns are welcome.
"Everyone is invested in getting a system that works well and does what we need it to do," she said. "It's not any good if we have a system that people don't feel comfortable using or don't know how to use, and that can be a frustration on the people who worked hard to bring the system to the University"
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