As a reminder, registration begins this week. Priority registration is Thursday, Nov. 8, senior registration is Friday, Nov. 9, junior registration is Monday, Nov. 12, sophomore registration is Wednesday, Nov. 14, and freshmen registration is Friday, Nov. 16. Registration on all of those days begins at 6:01 a.m. Make sure you have met with your academic advisor beforehand to be cleared for registration. The Registrar’s Office in South Campus Hall will be open beginning at 6 a.m. on all registration dates to assist with any issues that arise.
Matrix, the online system that students use to register for classes, has been known to have some issues, most notably crashing during every registration period when hundreds of students are attempting to register for classes at once.
The way registration is set up, certain groups (e.g. honor students, athletes, certified notetakers) have a priority registration period, followed by a period for all seniors, then juniors, sophomores and, lastly, freshmen. The system is incapable of handling thousands of class registrations from up to a thousand people at once, so the inevitable results are server crashes. One defining feature of Matrix has always been the registration cart, where students can put into a ‘shopping cart’ all of the classes they want to register for and then select them all at once as soon as their registration period begins.
However, a decision was recently made by the university administration to remove the registration cart from Matrix, essentially requiring students to register for classes one at a time. Presumably, this was done to reduce the amount of activity in the server at one moment and reduce the probability, as well as frequency, of crashes.
However, student reception to the initiative is not as positive as the administration. Junior Liana Teixeira weighs in: “Matrix has a history of crashing on class registration days, so I am worried about spring semester registration since the cart feature will no longer be available. Students will have to register for each class individually, and may be spending more time attempting to register for classes. The guarantee of getting all your classes is also lowered. The cart feature made it easy to get several classes at one time.”
Another issue that may arise from the removal of the registration cart is that students may attempt to circumvent the sequential registration method by keeping multiple tabs or browsers open for different classes. As senior Kelli Derleth adds, “While it’s not going to affect me for very long as I have one semester left, it’s going to be difficult to have so many tabs open at the same time in order to register for all your classes on time, mainly because the system crashes.”
Senior Josh Van Hoesen concludes with the following: “I think there’s more effective ways to solve the problem than removing the cart, and there should be more effort put into alternative solutions like a queued system.” As this is the first semester where the registration cart will not be available, it has yet to be seen whether removing the cart will improve the effectiveness of the Matrix system and reduce system crashes.
