Students began encountering difficulties with Experience, the website that houses the University of Mississippi’s new registration system, as priority registration opened on Monday, April 13.
Problems included difficulty logging onto the Experience platform, submitting registration requests and being prohibited from enrolling in classes because the system did not recognize earned pre-requisites for certain courses. Some students have been forced to file manual override requests.
The registration application shift from myOleMiss to Experience came as a part of the years-long initiative, Project Encompass, with the purpose to modernize the university’s information systems.
JT Cunningham, a junior political science major from Nazareth, Pa., said course registration on Monday was chaotic.
“My time ticket was at noon, and I logged in and the software itself worked fine. But the registration portal wasn’t working and I wasn’t able to sign up for my classes until 4:30 (p.m.),” Cunningham said.
The registration portal on Experience was not working for part of the day on Monday. Students reported only being able to register for Intermediate Algebra, MATH 0990. When they tried to search for and enroll in other classes, the system crashed.
Other students experienced similar problems.
Peyton Tangye, a freshman pharmaceutical sciences major from Littleton, Colo., encountered issues when registering for her science lab, which inhibited her ability to get her ideal schedule.
“My registration was at eight, but I wasn’t able to register for classes until nine,” Tangye said. “When the system finally came back up and I was trying to add my organic chemistry lab, it kicked me out, so I had to log in again and I wasn’t able to get the section I wanted.”
While some students faced problems while registering, UM Director of News and Media Relations Jacob Batte emphasized that the amount of successful student registrations was in line with years prior.
“An updated registration process is being implemented as we transition to a new student information system,” Batte said. “Priority registration began on Monday, April 13 and over the first two days, nearly 5,700 students have successfully registered, which is in alignment with priority registration numbers of prior years.”
However, on top of the class registration issues, some students believe that the university did not communicate effectively about how to address the issues they were facing.
“They didn’t send any emails saying the system was down or that the system was restored again,” Tangye said. “I had to talk to my adviser, who was overwhelmed with other students and did not understand what was going on.”
Batte elaborated on what efforts the university made to try to support students as they experience roadblocks during the registration process.
“Given the scale of the rollout of a new system and the registration process, the university had teams from across campus in place before registration began ready to address unexpected items and improve the experience,” Batte said. “The university is aware that there have been students who have encountered items that may be impacting their ability to successfully complete registration. We are actively implementing solutions and supporting our students every step of the way.”
Some students were simply frustrated with what they believed was a lack of preparation for the course registration process. Evie Maynard, a freshman biological sciences major from Clinton, Miss., wishes academic advisers were clearer with students about the new registration process.
“I didn’t know about the change at all,” Mayhard said, “I didn’t ask my adviser about the change (to Experience), but she didn’t bring up the new website at all. We only talked about my schedule.”
