Newark students try registering online
Archived article from Jan 28, 2000
By Douglas Frank
For many years, registering for courses at Rutgers meant standing in long lines at the gym. In 1992, the university speeded up the process with touch-tone phone registration. Soon, the process will be even quicker as university students register online.
All Newark students were able to use the Web to register starting Jan. 10 in a pilot project conducted by the registrar's office and Administrative Computing Services (ACS). This includes some 3,000 who didn't preregister and any of the other 7,000 students who might want to add or drop courses from Jan. 18 through Jan. 31.
Depending on how the pilot project performs in Newark, online preregistration could be open to all university students beginning in April for the fall semester, said University Registrar Ken Iuso.
"The university has been using the telephone registration system since 1992. Students love it, and it was extremely successful," said Iuso. "The Web gives them an opportunity to have a more visual presentation of the registration process, and when they register for a course, it comes back to them on the screen and gives them the meeting time and place, number of credits and other information.
"This is important because students can now print the information instead of having to take notes, a big advantage over the telephone system." Another major advantage is that the phone system can handle 120 calls at one time, while access to Web registration should be almost unlimited, Iuso said.
To register, students input their student numbers and the personal access codes that they now use for the telephone. Students, of course, need access to the Internet, but if they don't have a PC at home or in their dorm rooms, they can visit a computer center on campus. Touch-tone registration will also remain in effect.
"It's really a new paradigm for students; it changes things the way touch-tone changed the long lines," said James Drumheller, associate director of ACS. "It's faster, and it gives students the ability to add or drop multiple courses in one interaction."
Drumheller said the pilot project is starting in Newark to measure the university mainframe's ability to handle the volume. "We didn't want to be in a position not to be able to satisfy demand. That's the last thing we wanted. So we're limiting the pilot to the Newark campus. We expect to have approximately 20,000 transactions for adds and drops.
"We wanted to test during add-drop when demand was high but not outrageous, so we could make a judgment if we have to add resources to open it to the student body in general," he said. "We need to look at statistics and how the system was taxed before we make that decision."
Drumheller cited the work of programmer/analyst Patrick Stevens, who "put in a tremendous effort and a lot of additional time to get the program up and running for the add-drop period."
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