Having students register for classes during class times is problematic and could easily be changed. When it comes to signing up for popular classes like Environment and Energy Issues or Introduction to Sexuality Studies, a few minutes can make the difference between having the opportunity to take the class and being denied. This is why registering exactly at one’s allotted time is imperative, and being assigned a registration time during class causes real conflicts.
Because there are several classes in high demand each semester, in order to attempt to make things fair, the University has a system that rotates students within the same credit range between early, middle and late registration periods. Staggering the registration is necessary so that students don’t overwhelm the server by all attempting to register for classes at once. The rotation ensures that some semesters, students have the opportunity to get into the most well-liked classes while other semesters they may not, and that the older they get, the better shot they have at taking everything they want. While the rotation system seems to work out alright in principle, the problem with having a staggered time slot is that to get their fair opportunity to take classes, students need to register right away, and the vast majority of registration times are in the middle of classes.
This creates an unfair choice for students. While most students skip class in order to log onto WebSTAC and secure their next semester’s schedule, missing whichever random class one might have could be critical. And if a student cannot miss class for whatever reason, he will have to register two or three time slots after his assigned time. Obviously in many cases this is the determining factor in whether or not students actually make it into their preferred times and classes. Course offerings are one of the reasons students choose to attend this school, and students deserve the opportunity to take some of the University’s better classes. Forcing students to choose between going to class, for each of which they pay an extraordinary sum to attend, and claiming their spot in the registration process really does force them to sacrifice something important.
To solve this problem the school needs to change its registration times. While there is no period of the day where there are absolutely no classes and no time is perfect for everyone, it’s absurd that the time the University chooses to have students register is the one time that it knows works for almost nobody. Whereas almost everyone seems to have a 10 a.m. class, there are significantly fewer students taking classes in the evenings. Washington University should move registration times to between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. or have registration occur on the weekend to better accommodate the student body. This seems like a simple change that would help ensure fairness in one of the processes most critical to education.