ESTHER problems stunt registration process

By Sabrina Toppa     9/3/09 7:00pm

ESTHER may not be the self-aware joint project of a conspiracy between the government and Rice administration, but it nevertheless came to a screeching halt on the Friday of Orientation Week when the system slowed down so much it prevented some students from being able to register for classes at all. To accommodate the largest class in Rice's history, the Office of the Registrar designated two registration time slots based on the last six digits of a student's Rice ID. The first group registered at 8 a.m. and the second at 8:30 a.m. However, both groups encountered difficulty registering when a bottleneck in one of the system processes caused requests to cluster and impede the flow of oncoming requests. For students, this manifested as dropped connections and time-out errors.

For freshmen who could log-in on the first attempt, remaining logged in before ESTHER timed out proved difficult. Many reported that their session prematurely expired, causing ESTHER to reload the log-in page before they completed registration.

Students such as Duncan College freshman Rachel Green thought it was inconvenient to have only two staggered groups for Rice's largest entering class.

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"Maybe we should have had more than two groups, or a server upgrade," Green said. "Half the freshmen class was registering at 8 a.m. and we only got 30 minutes. I couldn't register for COMM 103, even the 8 a.m. one, and that was my last resort."

Many students, including Wiess College freshman Celeste Riepe, speculated that the large size of the incoming class precipitated the system problems.

"There were so many people that the servers could not log in people properly," Riepe said. "I logged in at 8:35 a.m. like I was supposed to, and I didn't get any classes until 10 a.m. And that was only when I began to enter my classes one by one instead of all at once. It took me more than 10 times to log into ESTHER."

However, both the Registrar and Information Technology Administrative Systems monitoring ESTHER said the size of the incoming class did not contribute to ESTHER's sluggishness.

"There was no correlation between the number of students registering and the system problem which occurred," Registrar David Tenney said. "It was a technical issue, not a number of students issue."

Vice President of Administrative Systems Randy Castiglioni said the problems with ESTHER were caused by a system-level issue at work.

"It could be a bug, overload, somewhere else in the system," Castiglioni said. "The load might have exacerbated it, but was not in and of itself the problem. Stress tests are done routinely after any system change to determine if there are system problems."

Castiligioni said the most recent system test was performed in July, after the last system change.

Regardless of the reason, Martel College sophomore Amber Makhani, who co-advised at Sid Richardson College, said the post-registration dropping was inexcusable.

"Last year during my O-Week, I was already stressed enough," Makhani said. "I can't imagine being a new student and that being my first experience with ESTHER and academics at Rice."

Makhani said many of the freshmen she advised were dropped from introductory to Linguistics or Psychology.

"It's not fair to have to put off your intro classes that are required for your major after the first semester," Makhani said. "It'll create a snowball effect. Kids who couldn't get into these classes will have to get into them next semester."

Baker College Peer Academic Advisor Lisa Tseggay saw the frustration at her own college.

"They knew we had more freshmen coming in and they tried to accommodate them in the way they thought was best," Tseggay said. "I guess they didn't foresee it happening. There were some freshmen in the first group who couldn't register at all, but after 9 a.m., it seemed like they were able to."

In the only section of LING 200: Introduction to the Scientific Study of Language offered this fall, 60 of 110 seats were already filled before freshman began enrolling. Assistant Professor of Linguistics Christina Willis said she has only four TAs to spread out among 110 students, which she cited as the principle reason for the registration drops.

"When you have a [teachers assistant], the max you want them to deal with is 25 students," Willis said. "Logistically, it doesn't make sense to have 140 students when you only have four TAs. All of these people need to have their work assessed."

To alleviate some of the registration problems, the Registrar's Office increased the caps on certain popular freshman-level introductory classes. However, 100 freshmen, including Duncan freshman Nicole Scott, were administratively dropped after academic departments or instructors realized the classes were over-registered.

"I got an e-mail from the Registrar saying 'Sorry, never mind, you've been administratively dropped from the class,'" Scott said. "I was kind of pissed because then I only had 11 hours and I had to run to find a class to be a full-time student."

O-Week advisers were unable to help the freshmen circumvent the trouble caused by ESTHER. Jenny Sullivan, a Martel College junior who co-advised at Sid Rich College, said the situation was very stressful for her freshmen.

"We spent so much [of O-Week] on academic advising, but when time came to register, it just fell through," Sullivan said.

While students were the ones most affected by ESTHER's slowdown, they were not the only ones upset at the registration process.

"It was frightening for us because we almost saw the system move to a screeching halt," Tenney said. "It didn't stop completely, but it moved at a snail's pace. We had a very slow registration, the slowest I have ever seen the system move.

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