Letters to the Editor

Dear Editor,

Two weeks ago, at the beginning of fall registration, PAWS was blocking students from enrolling in ECON/FINC 3830, because it had an incorrect prerequisite requirement. The university catalog states that the prerequisite for the course is ECON 2171 & 2172, or ECON 2105. Yet, PAWS lists FINC 3131 as the prerequisite. In an attempt to get the system changed so that students could enroll in the 3830 class, Wednesday morning I walked a letter over to the Registrar’s Office asking them to make the correction. The correction was finally made the next Monday.
Of course, the first week of registration is probably the busiest of the semester for the Registrar’s Office. But instead of simply correcting the system to be consistent with the catalog, what did they do? This is GC&SU, so the Registrar’s Office had to get at least one other signature. That’s right, they wanted the Associate Dean’s signature just to change PAWS to be consistent with the university catalog. Why you need someone’s approval to correct a simple and obvious error, I have no idea. If I can’t be trusted on a simple PAWS correction, how can I be trusted to advise students?
This is just one example of the bureaucratic disaster that is GC&SU’s registration and advising system. I’m sure students have many other examples. Each semester they go building to building collecting signatures on forms, just for permission to add classes, drop classes, take classes without prerequisites, get transfer credit for classes, withdraw from classes, take exit exams, get a graduation check, etc.
You’d think that at a school where we “educate each student as if one of them will someday be the leader of the free world” (from www.gcsu.edu) we should be able to trust the students to understand their degree requirements. Why can’t students decide whether or not to drop a class, without the signatures of their instructor and advisor? I have never denied a student’s request to drop a class. And unless there is someone on campus who has, there’s no need for those signatures. Even if I didn’t agree with a student’s decision to drop a class, what right do I have to prevent it?
We have come a long way from the days when faculty were responsible for planning students’ schedules and entering them into the computer. But we still have far to go before we have a system that works well. Students and faculty should push to overhaul the registration and advising system at GC&SU.
First, all students should have and read a paper copy of the university catalog, so they don’t have to go to their advisor’s or some administrative office every time they have a registration question. (Yes, the catalog is online, but it is not very user-friendly or easy to navigate, and sometimes there are errors.) Second, and more importantly, we need to separate “advising” from “registration.”
Faculty should be available for students to discuss classes within the discipline, career advice, graduate study, and other issues pertaining to the faculty member’s area of expertise. That’s advising.
Registration deals with administrative issues such as enrollment, transfer credits, exit exams, graduation checks, and other issues about which faculty have little expertise or authority. It is astonishing to me that we expect almost 300 faculty-even first year faculty-to be experts on the university’s catalog, administrative rules, and policy changes. In reality, each faculty advisor has a different interpretation or familiarity with the catalog rules. No wonder the students find the system confusing. They deserve better. Registration should be centralized.
For example, each school could have a Registration Office open M-F from 9-5. Students would go to this office anytime to get correct, consistent answers to all their questions on registration issues. Running this office would not require an expensive administrative position. It would require only one person who understands the university’s policies. It could probably be run using existing staff.
Perhaps more fundamentally, GC&SU should scrap all registration-related forms. Most of the forms we use are the same ones we had before students could register themselves by computer. We should start over and simplify things. We should require a signature only when there is a compelling reason to. Even in that case, only one signature-that of the school’s “registrar”-should be required. Imagine how simple registration would be, and how much less time we’d all be wasting.
Would centralizing registration move us away from being “student centered”? I don’t think so. Like most faculty, I am enthusiastic about interacting with students out-of-class. But I want that interaction to be academic in nature, not bureaucratic. At GC&SU, the faculty advisors are just another layer of the registration bureaucracy. Instead of wasting time explaining the catalog to students and signing countless forms, we could be doing meaningful advising.
There are a number of ways we could reorganize advising and registration that would improve our current system. Separating advising from registration is the key. Students should speak-up if they want things to change.

Sincerely,
Doug Walker
Associate Prof. of Economics

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Nov 14 2003. Filed under Letters to the Editor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry