ALINA PANEK — It was the cry of disappointment heard across the quad as rising seniors logged in to register for classes at 8 p.m. on April 10 to receive an error message that Banner has crashed, again.

Many are studying abroad and have stayed up in their respective time zones to register for classes. The first course registration unexpectedly crashed on April 3, causing the underclassmen registration to be pushed back another week and all classes registered to rising seniors on this day to be void.  

Mark Moller, Director of Advising, has been working closely with ITS and the Registrar’s office to transition the first years to the new advising program, Banner 9, during June Orientation. They chose June-O because they were able to treat registration during the summer as  a testing environment. They could have control over how students were taught to use the system and they could immediately troubleshoot any problems that arose.

After this test was successful, they decided to move forward with using this new system in Fall ’17 for Spring ‘18 courses. However, it was only used for first year student registration because the first years were already familiar with the system. Moller and his team had no foresight that this crash was going to happen.

“We were excited to use this new system for our upper-classes and confident that it would allow us to register them successfully. Staff from the Registrar’s Office, the Provost’s Office, ITS and my office all tested registration and followed standard procedures for preparing for a successful registration process,” said Moller.

To prevent upcoming crashes, ITS has come to the conclusion that all following years must register through Google Forms. To ensure fairness, the Registrar will follow the same three-tier prioritization process Denison has used in previous semesters to register students.

Students who had the 8:30 p.m. time slot in the fall will have their first two courses entered first, those with the 8:15 p.m. slot will have theirs entered second, and those with 8 p.m. will have theirs entered third. Submitted schedules within each group will not be processed in the order they were submitted.

Instead, all schedules within each group submitted by the deadline will be entered. Course registrations will be processed by the Registrar’s Office staff on Tuesday night. All students will then have access to their schedules and be able to Add/Drop and waitlist themselves for courses on Wednesday

morning after 8 a.m…

In addition to class registration being pushed back, housing selection was also postponed. Kristen Hausman, director of Housing and Planning, said that they pushed back selection because it makes the system more efficient in figuring out who needs a room.

Addressing concerns that the housing system will also crash during selection Hausman said that it isn’t likely because course registration and housing selection are two different systems and should not crash.

Rising senior housing selection went smoothly this past Thursday, reassuring people that housing selection for underclassmen will run similarly. As an insider tip, Hausman highly encourages that students have multiple plans with different numbers of roommates.