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The Rice Thresher
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by Olivia Allison Thresher editorial staff Students will be able to adjust their fall schedules beginning immediately after preregistration this year. Currently, students cannot add new classes or drop courses they have preregistered for until the beginning of the next semester. Allowing students to add and drop courses after they have preregistered April 2-6 will enable them to begin making changes to fall semester courses at any time before or during the first two weeks of the semester, Registrar Jerry Montag said. Also, because the Registrar's Office is hoping to introduce online registration beginning this fall, Montag said he will not implement a previously discussed system of preferential preregistration in the near future. The new add/drop policy was one change to preregistration approved by the University Council Monday. The other change is that students who miss the preregistration period will be able to preregister with a $35 fee through July 1. In the past, students who did not preregister by the deadline could not register until the beginning of the following semester. Montag said the changes will help course scheduling be more accurate. If students can change their schedules before the beginning of the semester, Montag said, scheduling rooms and ordering textbooks can be done accurately. "It will help class counts be more accurate because we'll have better pre-enrollment figures," Montag said. "I think with dropping and adding, if there are that many students who will make changes, let's have them make changes before the first week of the semester. ... I really see very positive factors coming out of this process." Montag said his main goal is to create an online registration system for next year's spring semester. "The university is working as fast as it can in trying to bring Web registration to life," he said. Montag said he met with divisional advisers in February to discuss how academic advising should be conducted when registration goes online. "We wanted to ensure that it still is a major part of registration, whether it's manual or Web registration," Montag said English Professor Dennis Huston, an academic adviser at Hanszen College who attended the meeting with Montag, said he is still concerned about what could happen once students are registering online. "I am afraid that it will make it much easier for students to register without getting advice," Huston said. "I am afraid that the people who need help and aren't good about getting it will sign up for the wrong thing." Huston added that Montag was very receptive to the problems academic advisers brought up. For example, Huston said the advisers were told by Montag that students would be able to continue to register on paper. Huston said this would be beneficial because he does most of his advising in the Hanszen Commons, where it would be difficult to do Web registration because of the small number of computers that can be brought into the commons. "I presume Web registration is the wave of the future," Huston said. "But because we do most of our advising in the commons, I am uneasy about [online] registration." Director of Academic Advising John Hutchinson said academic advising will still be important when students are registering on the Web. "I think the Registrar's Office and my office are in complete agreement about the importance of advising in the registration process," Hutchinson said. "We have a lot of work left to do." Dean for Enrollment Administration Barry McFarland, who is developing the online registration system, declined to comment on when the system would be finalized. Montag said he will not implement preferential registration because he does not want to make too many changes to the preregistration system at one time. Under a preferential registration system, senior students would register for courses first and freshmen would register last. "The overall idea is a good idea, but ... to make all these changes at once may be hard to digest or comprehend or to make sure it works as you'd like it to in the first place," he said. "I'd rather do it in stages." Montag said he thinks preferential registration might be an option for the future. "Right now, I would still like to pursue it, but I want to see," Montag said. "I want to have more experience going through the registration process myself as the registrar and seeing how it really works." Montag said by meeting with registrars at other universities, he has learned that registration systems should be unique to fit each university. "I guess I learned that what's good for one university may not be the best for another university," he said.
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