Registrar adds ESTHER restrictions

By Cindy Dinh     11/13/08 6:00pm

As online registration for spring semester classes began this week on ESTHER, some students encountered several inconveniences which prevented them from signing up for upper-level courses. For this registration period, the Registrar's Office is implementing the prerequisite rule established by the academic departments, which bars students who have not taken the required courses from registering for classes, Registrar David Tenney (Sid '87) said. Instead, students will need to bring a Special Registration form to the appropriate department and obtain the professor's signature to enroll in the course. However, the main difficulty was differentiating between what the academic departments deemed as hard prerequisites, which are absolutely required courses, and soft prerequisites, which are recommended courses, Tenney said.

"The biggest thing we ran into was not a problem in the system," he said. "The circumstance we encountered was the prerequisite the department gave to us is actually a recommendation for courses."

Several academic departments later submitted revisions changing the mandatory prerequisite courses to recommended prerequisite courses. Tenney said the registrars have changed over 100 courses since Monday night to recommended prerequisites, which will not block registration.

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"We worked all Monday late into the evening to update the system," Tenney said. "My wish was that we would know that before. This bothered me because our office was in conversation with every department for the past three months. It was a little surprise to me that there were so many changes this week."

Baker College junior Amy Liu said she knew several students who ran into problems with the new prerequisite block while registering.

"It was frustrating for a lot of my friends who had trouble registering, but I understand that the registrar has a lot to deal with since they've changed the system so much, including doing away with pin numbers," Liu said.

Assistant Registrar Debra Roberts said the office had a plan to implement the prerequisites with information from the departments.

"We went through a methodical list for calling departments," she said. "Most of [the problems] are just alternate courses that could be substituted, but the departments neglected to mention that to us."

This is the first time ESTHER has recognized prerequisites during the registration process.

The prerequisite rule is in place to ensure students have the basic knowledge of a course that the instructors assume students have and should not prevent students from taking courses outside of their expertise, Tenney said.

"I'm all for students for venturing outside and exploring things outside their major," Tenney said. "That's a good place to use the Pass/Fail [option]. My belief is enforcing the prerequisite is not going to prevent the student to venture out. For example, an engineering student may want to take some sociology or anthropology classes. But to jump into an upper class, 300 or 400 level sociology, it's appropriate to have prerequisites."

Will Rice College sophomore Ivan Van said students should be able to sign up for courses on their own, without extra restrictions from the registrar's office.

"I don't think enforcing the prerequisites through ESTHER was necessary," Van said. "I feel that prerequisites exist to make sure we have a certain level of knowledge before taking a higher level class, but I think it should be the students' own responsibility to police themselves."

A major difficulty with registration included courses that were cross-listed under different departments, Tenney said. Though these courses were identical in nature, they were not picked up by ESTHER, which barred students from registering for classes which needed those prerequisites.

"We had a few instances of some errors on our part and caught that on Monday," Tenney said. "Some course equivalents were not probably accounted for. The course prerequisite was Business 305, which is the same as Accounting 305 and regrettably the system was not catching that."

Baker College junior James Liu was faced with this situation when he tried to register for Biological Sciences 302, a second-semester biochemistry class, despite taking the prerequisites for it.

"The prerequisite is organic chemistry," Liu said. "I took the honors version of it. My guess is that all the people in honors Orgo didn't get into the class, but those in general organic chemistry did."

Several students alerted the academic departments and the Registrar's Office about the conflicts.

"I talked to [Peer Academic Advisors] who observed some of the initial challenges on Monday," Tenney said. "Thanks to them we were able to immediately address this. I regret that it's inconvenient this semester. The good news is that by going through this process we're not going to have this challenge in the future."

Students can still sign up for classes without taking the prerequisites by asking the instructor to sign a Special Registration Form that can be found on the Web site of the Registrar's Office.

"The role of the office of the registrar is to enable registration for students," Tenney said. "No way are we intending to block a student's academic career or make their academic choices complicated. As with any situation, the instructor always has the authority to override the prerequisite via the special registration form."

This override especially applies to students taking language classes who may have skipped the introductory-level courses.

"For people that have a mastery of the language and never took the 100- or 200-level course the instructor will let them take the course if they know the student has the language ability," Tenney said.

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