Spring registration still concerns students, despite Banner improvement

With class registration for the spring semester approaching, students raise concern about the registration process and their abilities to get into the necessary classes for their majors.

Saida Zerouali, ‘22, said she thinks the registration process should be revised so the site won’t crash when students try to register.

“I don’t think the administration is fully prepared, and equipped, to have the amount of people that they have scheduled to apply during those specific times,” Zerouali said. “I think they need to reduce how many people are going to register at one time, or they need to strengthen their sites to prevent it from crashing in the future.”

However, she said she is hopeful for future changes.

”If Lehigh doesn’t listen to the concerns of the students and take action, there is no way to progress in the future,” Zerouali said. 

Allen Taylor, director of Technology and Campus Services for Registration and Academic Services, said he believes the registration process has improved in the past seven years he has worked at Lehigh. 

He said the system is conducted under Library and Technology Services, which is operated by several servers. This system is designed to aid students while they are all trying to register at once, because the several hardware systems monitor and run the various registration attempts.

“With Banner, students are able to see their schedule being plotted out while they are registering for classes, which is something our old systems never provided,” he said. “Students are also able to do key-word searches to find all the classes taught for a specific term and major, which was not offered with the old program.” 

Taylor said the new block schedule introduced this fall semester has helped in the registration process for students. He said the Calendar Committee hoped that by making departments build sections on standard time blocks and offer more sections, students could put their schedules together more easily. 

This time block was also a way to prevent classes from overlapping with one another, which was a prevalent issue for many students. 

Andre Cronmiller, ‘22, said he believes the generalization of student block schedules makes it harder to incorporate multiple clubs into his schedule. 

“Having an hour and 15 minute lecture twice a day becomes monotonous,” Cronmiller said. “With the 50 minute classes, I feel like there was more variety and time for small breaks throughout the day.”