Registration Glitches Fixed

As underclassmen prepare to sign up for spring classes, University officials say problems that have plagued registration in previous weeks will not reappear.

For the second consecutive weekend, students battled with denied computer access and busy signals as personal identification number confusion and crashing servers delivered new frustrations to student registration.

The heavy congestion and higher traffic within the Student Central service is due to the new mandate that all students of the same class can register on the same Saturday. The old system required half of each class to register Saturday and the other half to register Sunday.

And although the new rule is supposed to help students get their needed classes, software glitches and assignment errors with PINs created more headaches than benefits.

Noah Lewis, a junior from Batavia, Ill., said, "Personally, I don't know why they combined (registration) from two days to one day, but I think it was a terrible idea."

Student Central failed to accommodate registering seniors two weekends ago and registering juniors this past weekend, as the system crashed both Saturdays.

Because of all the confusion, members of the Registrar's Office met with representatives of Administrative Information Services on Monday to acknowledge and mediate recent problems.

Along with the meeting, Donna Redmon, associate registrar, sent a mass e-mail to all juniors Monday evening to apologize for the registration confusion and explain future action that will alleviate the hassle.

Joel Dunn, director of systems and communications for AIS, is in charge of the technical standpoint of registration problems.

"The first weekend, we found a particular problem in one of the software programs," Dunn said. "This problem has been fixed. The second weekend, it was an entirely different problem in an entirely different piece of software."

The registration this past weekend encompassed two separate problems. The first problem was that the server for Student Central crashed.

Dunn said the crash was due to the software used by the University. "This software was implemented to try and make the (registration) system more robust. For some reason, the load-balancing software failed to forward requests from the browsers to the Web server."

He said AIS has contacted the software vendor to pinpoint and eliminate the problem.

However, unlike the senior registration weekend, junior students had trouble getting their PIN to access the site.

Nancy Davis, associate vice chancellor for University relations, said the problem occurred because of a printing error. "For a certain number of students, their PIN numbers were printed a second time, and for some reason, new numbers were assigned," she said. "So in effect, some of the students had two (PIN) numbers."

But the kinks within junior registration has some of the student body concerned. "You'd think at an institute of higher learning, the people in charge could come up with a more proficient way to register," said Racheal Ennis, a junior from Hickory.

University officials, however, are still confident about the new registration process. Davis said, "(Sophomore and freshman registration) will proceed as scheduled and we don't anticipate problems with (their registration)."

The University Editor can be reached at udesk@unc.edu.