From: kadie@cs.uiuc.edu (Carl M. Kadie)
Subject: []  Phone Registration at Berkeley
Originator: daemon@eff.org
Organization: EFF mail-news gateway
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1992 07:12:27 GMT


Date: Wed, 15 Apr 92  15:52 PDT
From: EWANDERS@cmsa.Berkeley.EDU
Subject:  Phone Registration at Berkeley

The following article appeared in The Daily Californian, an independent
newspaper distributed at UC Berkeley, April 14, 1992:

NO CLASSES FOR UNDECLARED IN TELEBEARS LIMBO

  UC Berkeley sophomore Erica Oliver is caught in a registration Catch-22.
Oliver says Tele-BEARS, the new registration-by-phone system heralded by
students and administrators as a faster, more efficient way to get classes,
won't let her enroll at all.  The system will not place Oliver in the
lower-division classes she needs to declare her major because she will be a
junior next fall, but won't allow her to enroll in any upper division classes
in her major because she hasn't declared it yet.

  "It makes me feel very frustrated," Oliver said.  "I just can't figure out
why in the world I'm paying this university if I can't get any classes."

  The phone-in system, initiated on campus last fall by a test group of 4,200
graduating seniors, guarantees students up to the maximum number of units their
college allows.  But the system doesn't guarantee students will be able to get
into classes they need in order to declare or fulfill major requirements.

  "Being a Junior, it's kind of late for not fulfilling the major
requirements," Jorge Garza, acting associate registrar, said of Oliver's
predicament.  Garza said he recommends to students in situations similar to
Oliver's to talk to an advisor about getting into the prerequisite classes.

  But Margaret Distasi, director of student advising in Campbell Hall, said it
may be difficult for undeclared students to get classes because major
departments may reserve courses for declared students by prohibiting undeclared
students from enrolling.  Garza said students will simply have to declare as
soon as possible in order to register for classes.  "This is going to force
students to process their paperwork (for declaring) faster," Garza said.

  Garza said his office sent out more than 5,000 letters to students last fall
offering a Tele-BEARS training session to inform students about how to prepare
themselves for using the system.  Only 39 students attended the session.

  But on its second day of use by the whole campus, Garza said the registration
process is going fairly smoothly.  "Most students are getting classes even if
they're not the ones they want because they haven't fulfilled certain
requirements," Garza said.  Tele-BEARS is scheduled to take 85 calls every 15
minutes during its operational hours, which Garza said would register the
entire student population in 10 days.

  [End of Quote]

This phone-activated registration system seems to avoid many of the risks that
others have remarked on for similar systems at other universities.  Each
student is assigned a PIN unrelated to the student ID number.  Each student has
several possible time periods in which to register spread over the 10 day
period.  We won't know until it is through how many students will miss their
time slots or otherwise fail to register properly, but the written information
seems pretty clear and complete.

What are the RISKS here?

For one thing, they thought they had done a large-scale test of the system by
having over 4000 students use it last semester.  The flaw was that by limiting
the test group to graduating seniors, they didn't test any number of
complications that may only occur for undeclared students, freshmen, transfers,
part-time students, those changing majors, etc.  Repeating a simple test many
times is not the same thing as showing that a procedure is flexible enough to
handle the full spectrum of real-world inputs.  They might have done a much
better test by having 400 students from a range of departments and classes use
the system rather than 4000 all from one class.  (Of course, selecting students
for the test at random might have been even better; by deliberately choosing
some from every major, they might well have forgotten to test undeclared
students.)

The second risk is less obvious.  At the same time they replaced mail-in
registration with the phone-in system, they changed the algorithm by which they
assigned classes.  Like many universities, Berkeley has difficulty offering
enough sections of certain classes to satisfy demand.  In the past, little
checking was done to see whether a student was eligible to take a requested
class.  Now, many departments can limit registration in certain courses to
students who have declared a major in that department.  Apparently, they also
now limit the ability of 3rd-year students to take lower division classed as
well.  Here the new method of ACCESSING the registration system is being blamed
for a problem that could just as easily have arisen in the old one.

A third risk is best exemplified by the final quote from Garza.  He appears to
have changed the definition of successful registration from "getting the
classes you want or need," to "getting any classes at all."  It is hard to tell
whether this is a case of retroactively changing the goals of a project to
match the accomplishments, or whether this is just the way registrar's office
droids see the problem of registration.

Eric W. Anderson, Chemical Engineering Dept., University of California
Berkeley CA 94720 ewanders@garnet.berkeley.edu ewanders@CMSA.berkeley.edu