Change Proposal: Confirmed Registration

Every student attending the University of Massachusetts Amherst must register for courses. Every semester approximately 17,5000 undergraduate, 4,400 graduate, and 1,000 continuing education students enroll in courses offered by the University. The process involves matching some 100,000 course places with student interest over the academic year.

The current process for enrolling most students in courses occurs in two phases. The first phase is pre-registration which occurs several months prior to the start of the upcoming semester. In this phase, students submit their requests for classes to the Registrar's Office. It is important to note that students can only make requests; they have no indication of whether they actually have a space in the course.

When the pre-registration period is over, the Undergraduate Registrar's office gives summaries of request counts and class rosters to the academic departments. Departments review the course request data over several days and then make specific modifications to course availability. Next, the Registrar's staff makes some manual adjustment to students' requests. Then the "main scheduler" is run. This program, written more than twenty years ago, maximizes student enrollments (matches requests to available spaces, shifting students between sections as needed) without allowing time conflicts in students' schedules.

Obviously, there is a long delay between the time a student requests courses and receives a confirmed schedule. Continuing students who pre-register in April for the following fall as well as new students who pre-register during the summer all receive their confirmed schedules in mid-August. The delay is shorter for the spring semester, with a gap of about eight weeks between pre-registration and receipt of a confirmed schedule.

The second main phase of the registration process is "add/drop." During the add/drop period starting about 1 ½ weeks before the semester commences, students can make changes to their course schedules, based on the availability of course spaces at any given time. Because the system has no capacity for waiting lists, students may need to call repeatedly to attempt to enroll in courses as others drop out, moment-to-moment.

An indicator of the consequences of the current system is the number of "involuntary drops". This figure represents the number of times a student was dropped from a course for which he/she had registered during pre-registration. In spring of 1999, there were 8,002 involuntary course drops; i.e., there were 8,002 instances of students being dropped from a course after having registered for it. Data from earlier years indicates that this amount may be at the high end of the typical range; the number of involuntary drops in the fall of 1999 was 5,992.

Student satisfaction surveys suggest that, although students generally find the mechanics of registration manageable, they are not fully satisfied with the results. Students seem to feel content with their course schedule when they request courses: in a survey conducted by the New Students Program in the summer of 1999, 92% of entering students reported they were pleased with their tentative course schedule. Yet they may be disappointed when their requests are not fulfilled. In the fall of 1999, less than half of first-year students surveyed by Project Pulse reported that they were very satisfied with their course schedule when they received their registration information.

Fundamentally, the implementation of PeopleSoft involves a shift from two-phase registration to a one-stop registration. During all registration periods, students will receive immediate, real-time feedback on course openings and can continue looking for available seats until their schedule is complete. Students will enjoy the ability to finish their registration, with confirmation of their enrollment, in one registration session.

The enrollment process will be equitable while enforcing the eligibility rules, capacity limits, and enrollment priorities defined by academic departments and academic policy. This should allow departments and faculty to have earlier information about confirmed enrollments, facilitating planning. It should also result in less shifting of enrollments during add/drop, since students will have had more control over their schedules entering into the add/drop phase.

The confirmed registration process in PeopleSoft features a "waitlist." This feature can be employed for selected courses to enable the system to track students who would like to take an oversubscribed course and enable departments to later offer them a place when other students drop the course.

The implementation of PeopleSoft will also enhance connections between the Registrar's Office and the Bursar's Office. More timely information about students' credit totals will be available to the Bursar's Office, resulting in more accurate bills for graduate students and the part-time undergraduates who are billed on a per-credit basis.

Go to Proposals