The Forum (newspaper)
Sponsored by the Salvatori Center
The days of long lines outside the CMC registrar could very well be over. According to emails sent to both Claremont McKenna students and faculty, the registration system is finally ready to go online, literally. Following suit with Pomona College, the Portal system will be implemented for the first time during registration for the spring 2010 semester. In an email sent to CMC faculty, registrar Elizabeth Morgan detailed the changes and challenges the system entails.
“Our plan is to have the first ½ of our senior classes register online first thing in the morning of 12/1/2009. We expect that if the system fails, it will do so early, as happened with Pomona’s initial pilot last spring. We have built in two hours of “recovery time” in the late morning, in case we need to abort the web-registration pilot and return to in-person registration. If the first groups registering that morning are able to do so without experiencing any systematic problems or failures, we plan to make web-registration available to the rest of the undergraduate students who are pre-registering for spring 2010.”
What does this mean for students? The old process by which students received permission to register from their advisors is now obsolete. Instead, students will partake in a new version of the web-advising system available on the faculty version of the Portal. Because an advisor must give electronic permission to a student (in lieu of the paper permission slips), Morgan has recommended faculty meet with student advisees no later than November 30 to complete preregistration.
Other features include new tools available to faculty to approve and deny students permission into full or closed classes. While registration in the past has meant multiple trips to the office located in Bauer North, much of this legwork will be shifted to the online system. Provided the process goes as planned, CMCers should be able to take full advantage of the options the Portal system enables.
In the meantime, let’s hope that CMC’s pilot run goes smoothly. During Pomona’s initial pilot in the last spring, there were initial technical difficulties in the Portal system, leading to a complete crash (hence the two hour “recovery time” Morgan speaks of). While the remainder of Pomona’s registration went smoothly, let’s cross our fingers that it’s a smooth transition in the next couple weeks.