It’s time to modernize our Web Registration


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Perhaps one of the most stressful aspects of college life is registering for courses and organizing a class schedule. As if stressing about homework, exams and papers is not  enough, the process of registering for classes with USC’s Web Registration adds another layer of pressure and hassle each semester. Web Registration, to be frank, is egregiously outdated. In today’s world in which we are constantly connected, Web Registration is anachronistic in the face of other websites like Amazon or LinkedIn. And at a school like USC, it’s difficult and confusing to reconcile a university that prides itself on the cutting edge, yet still utilizes a site that rivals an old-school chat room on Hotmail. The process of registering for classes is stressful enough — it’s time for the administration to streamline the system and make it easier to navigate, search and register for courses.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with the courses offered or the schedule of classes itself. But the way students access the catalog, add courses and register is outmoded. To even get to Web Registration, you have to either log in through myUSC and click on “Web Registration” or search “USC web registration” and click a link to the site. Through the latter, you have to sign in using your student ID and password — one which is completely different than the password used for myUSC. Once you’ve signed in and chosen a semester, it’s tab time. To clearly manage adding classes and viewing your schedule, you’re better off opening up separate tabs in your browser for the department list, course bin and calendar view to see which classes are available, which ones you’ve added (and can later unschedule or remove) and view your classes in a calendar format to see if there are any conflicts. Jumping between each category and making sure everything is squared away is cumbersome and superfluous. There are just too many hurdles to cross to identify a conflict, unschedule a class, remove the class, add another class to replace it and then check if that has a conflict as well. By the time you do that, you’ll be timed out or automatically signed out and directed to the direct login page that you most likely will not know the password for because you logged in through myUSC. Furthermore, there are no course descriptions or methods to search for a specific class, professor or time/day.

The site itself isn’t bad if it launched in 2005. There is something fundamentally flawed when it is easier to make an appointment on the website of the DMV than it is to register for “Arts of Asia.” Navigating the site is too archaic in terms of today’s standards of technology.

The Office of the Registrar and the Office of the Provost need to revamp Web Registration and make it easier, faster and more user-friendly for students to sign up for classes and organize their schedule. Students should be able to search by a number of filters and view the catalog of classes more easily. Perhaps there should even be a method of inputting the classes you wish to take in which the system offers a number of possible schedules you can register for. Let’s say you wanted to take two cinema classes, a French course and a General Education course, you did not want classes on Fridays and you preferred morning classes — you could then input those preferences and be presented with a list of possible schedules with dates, times and the availability of the classes. Or even more simply, students could view what a class is about or the level of difficulty of a course. Rather than splitting one’s time between a course bin and calendar view, combine the two fields and students can add or remove a class more easily if there is a conflict.

Any improvements are welcome improvements. Today’s Web Registration is ill-equipped to help students. Just as other sites students use, such as Financial Aid, have been updated and made easier to navigate, it’s time to update the process and system we use to register for our classes.

As our good friend would say, “Are you sure you want to drop ‘USC: Web Registration’?” Yes, I would.

Athanasius Georgy is a junior majoring in economics. His column, “Campus Talk,” runs  Thursdays.