Registration worse than it was before - Placebo Effect

Welcome, students of Johns Hopkins, to the dawn of the Information Age. Actually, it's less a dawn than the flicker of an almost - dead light bulb which sparks on for a second before burning out. Yes, once again we students have been handed, in typically-Hopkins fashion, an "improvement" that, when all is said and done, actually causes more headaches than it relieves.

Online registration is something that I've looked forward to for years, especially on those days late in each semester when I stood in line in the Levering lobby, wondering why one of the top universities in the world's most technologically advanced country still used carbon paper to keep track of registration (along with a striking number of other things, as I've learned as a student employee for various university offices). The fact of the matter is, however, that this semester's implementation of the pilot online registration program led to increased paperwork , more registration red tape and a bewildered student population. These problems, which are partly inherent to the system in its current form, and partially due to excusable first-time snafus, were exacerbated by the overlapping of the registration process with this semester's changes to the academic advising system.

For starters: what's the use of the notorious "green form" now required to demonstrate that one has met with ones advisor, filled out the graduation checklist, and confirmed it with the Academic Advising office? Granted, it does all those things, but so does the checklist itself. The form contains no actual information. just two signatures which are themselves duplicated from another form. Would someone care to explain. Of course, in the interests of fairness, I should note that some of my bitterness stems from the fact that this form single-handedly (single-form-ed-ly?) held up my attempts to register for 24 hours, despite my having all the rest of the aforementioned paperwork. Kafkaesque bureaucratic redundancy or a typical day at Hopkins? You decide.

Having cleared that hurdle, the next bit of procedural bizzarity was the fact that, being a Writing Seminars major, all the classes I take in my department are "permission required." Being a second semester senior, I decided to go easy on myself and only take four classes. Two of my four classes being Writing Seminars, a full 50 percent of my course load had to be registered for in person. At that point, it would hardly seem worthwhile to register online at all, but try telling that to the Registrar's office. Were I able to register that day, it would have involved my sitting at a computer in the Registrar's office, completing the meager portion of the online registration process I could do myself, and then have the office staff enter the other half of my classes. Another redundancy.

As regards the student experience of registration this semester, I won't repeat some of the other horror stories I've heard, of classes of which the system denies the existence while the professor asserts it, of other Sems majors in my situation who got errors when the registered for classes because, with their "permission required" classes subtracted, they didn't have enough credits and so on. I'll stick to my own experience, and state that Levering lobby was more crowded than I ever saw it when all students had to register there, not just the 75 percent who supposedly do now. At the same time, the Registrar's office and Academic Advising were similarly mobbed with students seeking answers, looking for signatures and whatnot. The result was overworked staff members, who, given the situation, can be excused their shortness with students who were unaware of the intricacies of the new process. What is harder to explain is the fat that every time I was sent to a new office, I got a different set of answers as to which signatures I needed to get the blasted process done with. The students are confused, the paperwork is piling up and the administration keeps giving conflicting responses. Another typical day at Hopkins.

Online registration is a worthy goal, and the administration should continue to pursue it (along with pursuing the eventual goal of tracking down the guy who wrote the last online registration program in MUMPS and subjecting him to slow torture for screwing us over). But do us all a favor, guys, and don't think that it helps to give us a half-done version with such limited functionality that it is incompatible with many of the types of courses being offered. Oh, and get rid of the green form while you're at it.