Many students at the College had problems registering on The Electronic Student Services (T.E.S.S.) because the system failed to recognize prerequisites and provided incorrect credit amounts for certain courses.
"The problems are primarily due to the transformed curriculum and coding within the system," according to Frank Cooper, director of Records and Registration.
Cooper said, "A lot of it has to do with overlapping of the transformed courses and the original courses and the way we code it on the Student Information System (SIS), which is our software."
Errors of this kind have occurred across the departments and schools at the College.
"Chorale, the singing group, showed as zero credits when it should be a half credit," Chris Proulx, sophomore vocal music education major, said.
"We couldn't register at first and we are required to take it, so people were worried and told the profs and they took care of it," Proulx said.
Christine Leichliter, assistant dean for student services of the school of art, media and music, said, "It was submitted correctly and was probably just some technical error, but it has been fixed."
Nancy Da Costa, sophomore accounting major, said, "I couldn't register for Info Systems, which I need as an accounting major, because it would only let business majors register. There was only 1 spot left, and by the time I got the problem fixed it was taken, so now I'll have to take it another semester."
Cooper, however, said, "As students discover the prerequisite issues, my staff enters the students in the courses anually."
Da Costa also had problems registering for two business courses that had Psychology 101 as a prerequisite. "I took it in the summer as a transfer course and it was on my transcript, but T.E.S.S. didn't recognize it," she said.
Amanda Conforti, sophomore psychology major, had the same problem. "I had Psych 101 from Fairleigh Dickinson University and it wouldn't recognize (the transfer credits) as prerequisites for any psych courses."
"I couldn't get in one of my classes," Ross Bucholc, sophomore organizational psychology major, said, "because I wasn't a business major, even though this class is a mandatory class for my psych major."
Many of the staff at the College are just as confused by the scheduling problems. Bernard Bearer, assistant professor of English, said, "I have no idea what the cause is, and no idea what's going on. All I know is that there are prerequisite problems."
"Have you heard of what a corequisite is?" Robert C. Cole, chair of journalism, asked, "Because I hadn't even heard the term before." The prerequisite and course credit problems, though, seem to be the only problems that have been occurring during registration. Students no longer must wait hours to register because the system was overloaded.
According to Cooper, T.E.S.S. has been registering about 100 students within the first 10 minutes of each of the registration windows.
In response to the prerequisite and credit issues, Cooper said, "We apologize for the inconvenience."
