Campus will soon find out if the new course registration system will work or run into problems.

Today is the first day of registration for Fall 2007 courses for graduate and post-baccalaureate students. Campus seems anxious to see how the new system will work for Eastern.

“It takes a lot of time to put a system like this together and to see that it works,” said Registrar Sue Harvey.

She has been heavily involved in switching registration to the new system as part of Banner, the Enterprise Information System Enhancement.

“When you switch to a new system, you try to cover as many possibilities as you can, but I can’t guarantee that everything is going to be 100 percent,” she said. “But we’re just not anticipating anything major.”

Harvey said the university has been doing mock registrations with the new system and trying to work out all the bugs to make the switch a smooth one.

One area that has raised some concern has to do with prerequisites and class levels for students. Students’ academic histories have not been completely switched over to Banner, which means the registration system will not know if students have fulfilled prerequisite requirements for other courses during registration.

To prevent problems with registering, this portion of the new system will not be used to register for Fall 2007, Harvey said.

“There was some question as to whether or not classes were going to be in (Banner) correctly for students,” Harvey said. “Rather than blocking students from registering for classes which they were eligible, we chose to remove the class restrictions for right now.”

However, the psychology and mathematics departments will be using this portion of the system to see how it responds, Harvey said.

In addition to prerequisite restrictions, the system will not use any restrictions that would prevent freshmen and sophomores from registering for classes they are not eligible for because of class level.

Harvey said students’ advisers should check these restrictions.

In addition to the prerequisites, advisers are waiting to see how some other changes in the new system will work, said Monica Zeigler, academic adviser and chair of the Campus Advising Network.

“One of the things that we may be concerned about is that when students are allowed to register, everyone is allowed to register at the same time,” Zeigler said. “We’re not quite sure how the system is going to take all of these students at one time.”

She said the university does not expect that high traffic in the system will cause a problem, but this is a change from the previous system. Under the old system, students registered on different days according to the last digits of their Social Security numbers. But now, on April 23, the first day of registration for freshmen, all students will have access to the system as of 6 a.m.

“As advisers, we’re telling all of our students you better get up, you better get on the system,” Zeigler said.

She’s also telling her students about the new course reference numbers they will need to register for appropriate classes. Instead of a course number, students will need to use a five-digit number to register for each course.

And besides the course reference numbers, students will also need to have their alternate PIN number, which should be assigned to them by their advisers.

“We’re moving to a more automated system overall, so students have to get an alternate PIN number to register,” Zeigler said.

The PIN number will require students to see their advisers before registering and also prevent other advisers from flagging a student to register.

Before the new program, any adviser could flag any student, allowing them to register, Zeigler said.

“If we think advising is important, then we should think students should see their adviser,” she said.

Zeigler expects to receive phone calls and questions from her advisees about some of the changes as they begin to register. Until the system is put to use, however, there’s no way for her to anticipate what issues might arise.

“We’ll just have to wait and see what questions come in,” she said.

Bonnie Irwin, dean of the Honors College said she is trying to answer registration questions before they cause problems by preparing students for priority registration.

Another change in the new system is going to add another step in the process for priority registration students.

Now, those students will be registering the same day as seniors, April 2, but they won’t be able to register on their own.

“In order to maintain priority registration for students, the staff will be registering them,” Irwin said.

All honors students who are not already seniors must make an appointment with the Honors College so that a staff member can register them early. Priority registration students outside of the Honors College have had to make different accommodations as well.

Three staff members at the Honors College will register students in 10-minute increments throughout the week.

Irwin doesn’t expect all students to take advantage of priority registration, but if they do, the three staff members will have to register about 500 students.

“It’s somewhat of an inconvenience,” Irwin said. Students have made 10-minute appointments to register, not leaving much time for trouble with the new system.

“We’re depending on the student and the adviser carefully selecting the classes the student needs beforehand,” Irwin said. “We will not have time to advise while registering.”

Irwin has contacted honors programs at other universities that also use the Banner course registration system to ask how they go about priority registration. She hopes to find a different way to register in the future.

“I think it’s too soon to tell what kind of impact (Banner is) going to have on the way we do business,” Irwin said. “Change is always going to create some anxiety. What I’ve seen of the other systems of Banner, I’m very happy with.”