Approximately 20 students have been deregistered from The Electronic Student Services Menu (TESS) and the Simple Online Courseware System (SOCS) for neglecting to pay their bills.
According to Frank Cooper, director of records and registration, the request came from the Office of Student Accounts.
After a student has failed to pay his bill and following numerous attempts of the Office of Student Accounts to contact him through e-mails and phone calls, warning of such consequences, he will be removed from TESS.
At that time, the student is not eligible to be registered as a full-time, paying student, Cooper said.
Within 24 hours of being deregistered from TESS, a student will also be deregistered from SOCS.
"SOCS, on a nightly basis, connects to the mainframe TESS works off of," Craig Kapp, instructional technology coordinator, said.
"If a student has been removed from TESS, we will receive a feed for them to also be removed from SOCS," Kapp said.
Instructors, too, have consequently been affected, as the Advising, Registration and Transcript Information Exchange (ARTIE) system where they attain their student rosters, runs off of the same mainframe system.
All students removed from the system have been notified of this status by the Office of Student Accounts.
Upon payment of their bills, the students will be reregistered onto the system with their previous schedules.
As a result, all students should have no problem regaining their status as a student, according to Cooper.
"This is something regularly done every year, so I don't know why they're making it seem like a bigger deal this time," Cooper said.
"If the students had time to give their money and were not responsible in doing so then, yeah, deregistering is fair," Sangita Desai, freshman finance major, said.
"The Office of Student Accounts goes to great lengths to contact the students and help them out through e-mails and personal phone calls and this is what has to be done when there is no response after all that," Cooper said.
Despite the College's numerous attempts to make students aware of the effects of their unpaid bills, Kapp has received several inquiries from students through the SOCS help system asking why they were removed.
"SOCS is just an end-customer of the whole system," Kapp said.
"If a student cannot log-in to SOCS, it is because their removal from the whole system has rolled through to us," he added.
"If students can rectify the situation, they will be able to log back in as soon as we get new info through the mainframe," Kapp said.
According to Cooper, several students in this situation who have recently paid their bills have already been reregistered with their previous schedules, glitch-free.
