One of the most stressful times of the year for a college student is the class registration period. Enrolling in the correct classes is extremely important.
If Texas State students are unable to take the classes needed to fill sections within their degree audit, they risk having to enroll in courses that don’t contribute to their degree. Worse, if they are unable to register for a required class, their graduation date might be postponed.
Mallory Juarez, a psychology senior, said even with her early honors college registration slot, she had to wait for about half an hour for the Texas State enrollment website to load and confirm the classes she was registering for.
“Whenever I logged on, it pretty much buffered for 30 minutes and I had to just sit there refreshing until it worked,” Juarez said.
Unfortunately, this was not an isolated incident. The year before, Juarez had to wait over an hour for the website to load during her class. Each year, Juarez said she thinks registration will be different or more efficient and each year, she is disappointed.
“It seems like every year everyone has the same issues and you would think that eventually those issues would be figured out and corrected, but, they’re not, year after year,” Juarez said.
However, hope is not lost. The main way to tackle issues such as website crashes and long loading times is to understand why the issue is caused in the first place. According to QueueIt, class registration times cause surges in website traffic which slow and threaten the websites.
Of course, students can wait until after their time slot opens to register for the classes they need. However, the more time a student waits to register after their time slot opens, classes get closer to reaching capacity. Therefore, it is important to register as early as possible.
Currently, Texas State opens registration time slots throughout 12 weekdays: April 1 through April 16. During these weekdays, two separate groups have their time slots opened at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. This means there are 22 different opening time slots, resulting in 22 different surges to the enrollment website.
One way this could be combatted is by having more time slots open over the course of the 12 weekdays.
Instead of only having two time slots, the system could open at 8 a.m., 10 a.m., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. This would ideally spread out the number of students registering.
Along with this, more traffic is brought to the registration site because summer registration opens at the same time fall registration does.
If summer registration happened earlier in the year, then people only registering for summer courses would not contribute to the traffic on the website when others are registering for fall.
Lastly, if courses without sections for each specific semester were removed from the registration site completely, it might cause students to spend less time on the website choosing the classes they want.
Of course, it is still beneficial for students to know that these courses exist. However, when they are not offered anymore or not open for current registration, it would be beneficial to remove them from the registration site.
Currently, the best way students can prepare for registration is to create a plan on the registration website. This way, their classes will be saved before they register, allowing students to spend less time on the registration website, causing less traffic.
Despite this one solution, Texas State must still consider changing the way registration is conducted. Finals season is stressful enough, and registration does not need to be another item added to the list of things students must worry about.
-Madison Green is a psychology and advertising senior
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