ACES reform necessary

In the midst of rising seniors crashing the server to enroll in their penultimate semester of college, I have noticed that the school faces some big problems when it comes to registration. Administrators in departments don't seem to see the demand for some classes and students at the same time are forced to check their bookbags night after night until registration opens usually to find many of the classes they were interested in filling up much earlier than they expected. Should students have to suffer with this painful system or will the administration finally expand popular classes and let students who pay around $50,000 a year to come to this school take the classes that interest them most?

I proposed a change to the ACES registration system back in November 2006 to Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta. His response was optimistic and he forwarded my message on to a series of people who implement the system and are currently working on the new version of ACES to be tested this summer (see the March 20 article "New ACES platform to launch in summer 2008"). The idea was relatively simple-you take data that already exists and use it in a beneficial way for both administrators and students alike.

The concept is that there would be registration report that a student could generate on the enrollment page at any time. Similar to the academic advising report, this would perform a search in the database for the classes that you have in your primary bookbag. What it would do is the following: find the total amount of students who have a registration window before your date and have the class in their primary bookbag. That number would automatically be taken away from the slots of spaces for the course and if that number was negative, the result would be a wait list. Then, it would search for how many students on your registration window have the class in their primary bookbag. From this information and using some probability statistics, it would advise a student whether or not the likelihood of enrolling into the class was high.

By presenting this information, students would get a reasonable idea of how many people ahead of them plan on taking a certain class so they can focus more time in the future to research and find alternative classes. In turn, administrators would be able to judge how popular a class may be or-in the case of necessary classes like my Mechanical Engineering 150 course this semester-expand the sections before 22 people are wait listed for a required class that only has 36 spots. I ponder how the administration underestimate the demand for such required classes.

In any case, this proposal that I have had for the past two-and-a-half years has gone absolutely nowhere in the hands of the administration. I have followed up on countless times asking for updates on the status of my changes and hoped at the time to see them come into effect before graduating. It is for this reason that I have decided to write about my idea in hope that others will think of other better changes that will make Duke an even better place to be. I'm so glad registration is over for next semester, but I'm not looking forward to my last semester where I have three required classes to graduate and cannot accept any course conflicts.

Scott Steinberg

Pratt '09