Although a number of students have reported registration issues with the ACES/STORM system, administrators said they had not heard of a problem.
Some undergraduates have reported being frustrated by network delays and slowdowns while registering for classes. Many seniors, who registered for classes last Thursday, recounted tales of scheduling troubles for students fighting over limited spots in popular classes and expressed exasperation with the system.
“It's exasperating to not get into either the classes you need to graduate or the classes you've wanted to take since freshman year due to some silly crash,” senior Jenny Hu said. “ACES just really needs to be able to accommodate more users at any given time.”
All seniors sign up for courses in the same registration window, meaning that ACES must be able to process more than 1,500 registration requests at the same time. Each of the other class years are split into three registration windows.
Representatives of both the Office of Information Technology and the University said that they were not aware of problems with this year's registration.
“We have received no indications of any system problems during any of the enrollment windows thus far,” University Registrar Bruce Cunningham wrote in an email Monday. “OIT has seen no indications of service reductions or interruptions.”
Some seniors said they received error messages while others had to restart the process because the initial registration request took a long time to be processed.
Hu said she found that while one browser tab was stuck loading, opening a separate tab and restarting the process allowed her to enroll successfully even while the original window was still processing.
Cunningham noted that students should be careful not to do anything with the system while their requests are being processed. If anything interrupts the enrollment process, it is stopped and the student is placed at the bottom of the queue when their request is resubmitted.
Some students said that they used unconventional measures to avoid the bandwidth bottleneck that results from over a thousand simultaneous clicks on the enrollment button.
Senior Wenjia Xu said he used the public visitor’s wireless network in an attempt to ease the strain, but still experienced issues.
“I’m not sure it made a difference,” he said. “The problem seemed to be with ACES/STORM."
Students also noted various inconveniences within the system, such as not being able to use the back button or being logged out and supported an overhaul of the system.
ACES is continuously updated throughout the year, Cunningham wrote.
“Next Spring, for the Fall 2014 registration cycle, we’ll be introducing a Schedule Planner function,” he wrote. “It is similar in function to the Schedulator web site that was written by students several years ago and is used by many students now.”
Unlike Schedulator, however, this function will allow students to find ideal schedules and download them directly into their bookbags. It will be fully integrated with ACES/STORM, allowing course data to be more accurate than what is provided by Schedulator, Cunningham wrote.
In the meantime, however, a number of students are trying to find solutions for their scheduling issues.
“I have friends who are majorly stressing out because they didn't get into their T-req classes,” Hu said. “I think it really frustrates everyone and causes unnecessary stress.”
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