St. Olaf students participated in a new live registration system for interim 2021 and spring 2021 classes.
Live registration replaced the lottery-like registration in which students created multiple class schedules in the hopes of getting into all of their desired classes.
The introduction of a live registration system meant that students registered for courses on a first-come, first-served basis within the designated time slot for their class year and that they immediately knew the availability of courses.
However, with live registration, most students went online as soon as registration opened to add their courses as fast as possible. In theory, this system allows students to know immediately what classes are available and if their choices are still open, but students experienced many issues during the live registration process.
As students began to register, St. Olaf’s Student Information System (SIS) froze and kicked students off of the website. By the time students reloaded the page, some classes had already filled.
“[Live registration] was very stressful because it kept crashing, and you could only pick one class at a time,” Eesha Nagwani ’23 said. “I feel like this works for big universities but at St. Olaf, it’s not as successful.”
Since underclassmen registered later in the week, they had a limited selection of classes as upperclassmen had already filled many classes.
College Registrar Ericka Peterson, alongside the College’s Information Technology team, prepared for issues, monitoring and fixing problems as they arose.
We should be able to make sure that these kinds of glitches do not show up in subsequent registration periods,” Peterson said.
