Registration Plagued by Glitches

Joel Dunn, director of systems and communications for AIS, said he does not know why many students could not access Student Central when they tried to enroll in classes for the fall semester.

"I can't tell you what the problem was," Dunn said. "We are still investigating it."

He said six computer engineers who were monitoring the system when registration began at 10 a.m. became alarmed when less than a quarter of the normal rate of traffic accessed the Web site.

Dunn said the AIS staff monitoring the situation saw a constantly low level of activity on the system between 10 a.m. and 11:40 a.m. -- a time Dunn said is usually the most active.

"We have done this enough times, we know what the workload we should be getting is, and we were not at that level."

AIS officials ran a series of checks but could not find anything out of the ordinary. "We've looked at every possible thing at least once," Dunn said.

At 11:40 a.m., Dunn said the number of hits picked up unexpectedly and ran at a normal rate for the rest of the day.

In past years, class registration has been plagued by an assortment of problems, but Dunn said his department has never seen this type of problem before.

"The system ran successfully last fall, and we had a high rate of confidence it would work well," Dunn said.

Rising senior Julie Benson said she grew frustrated after she tried for an hour and a half to schedule her classes.

She said she encountered errors messages saying the Web site would not load and that it could not access the pages she needed to complete her registration.

"It was really frustrating," she said. "There are a couple of really good classes I was trying to get that everyone wants."

Benson said she also was trying the phone registration number but kept getting busy signals. Eventually, she had her boyfriend, who was able to access the system, register for her classes for her.

Dunn said they are working hard to figure out what happened before rising juniors register in two weeks. "At this point in time, unfortunately, I can't make a guarantee that it will work, but we are going to do our utmost to make sure it is running as good as we can."

The University Editor can be reached at udesk@unc.edu.