“The Hunger Games” is what the registration process is known for at AUI. For the older students, having the registration period open earlier is meant to ease the process and lessen the crowd. On the other hand, on Wednesday, the youngest AUIers of Fall 2020 will compete to get the best sections of classes possible to meet all the prerequisites for their future classes. At the top of everything, the COVID-19 pandemic added up to this battlefield. In this in-depth, we are going to look at the different procedural adjustments done by the university for Spring 2021 Preregistration.
First-Year Students and Preregistration Process
Usually, according to the Student Handbook, there are three main steps to the Course Pre-registration Process:
“1- Course Selection – students meet with their advisors to choose courses (and alternate courses). The advisor must approve the courses, and provide a registration clearance. 2- Pre-Registration – students reserve their classes online during their designated time (based on the number of semester credit hours earned). 3- Add/Drop – students revise their schedule online as needed over an extended period of time.” (Student Handbook, pp. 59)
However, no one has actually bothered to update these steps based on the current situation in the handbook. Since the addresses of administrative departments in charge are famous for unresponsiveness, students are expected to learn all the new information from their CLE Mentors or they figure it out themselves if they ever could.
“I am very scared and stressed about tomorrow [day of freshman registration] because I don’t know whether or not something happens unexpectedly.”
Kaoutar Benazzou, Freshman Student
Above all, because every little service provided by the university has now moved online, the preregistration process did not remain an exception. Freshman and sophomore students are expected to book mentoring sessions through which they will figure out which classes to take and how. They then will send a preregistration form to their mentors who are supposed to take care of the process of clearance from then on.
CLE and the center piece of Preregistration of Spring 2021
While there are several departments expected to take care of a simple course registration period, the burden of main informative responsibility is seemingly on CLE. The CLE mentors are to make sure to check the degree plans of younger students and to then check their preregistration forms. They “then upload the files to the advisors’ shared folder and send an e-mail to the advisor notifying them.” Dr. Chraibi the CLE Coordinator told me.
“Compared to pre-Covid-19 registrations, it’s more intense. Now, sessions need to be booked beforehand, and thereafter, it is somewhat time-consuming (having to upload documents in a specific folder and sending an email to CLE admins to be sent to advisors),” explained Oussama Tlaghi. But one can ask whether or not “time-consuming” does justice to what mentors are going through while keeping up with their own classes.
Problems Faced by CLE Mentors
While mentors are trained and paid to respond to questions of their mentees and take care of their unique academic concerns, they are carrying a huge burden of responsibilities especially at this time of the semester. These challenges range from the making of degree plans to the day of preregistration itself. It is widely argued that the “preregistration documents” in regards to the new catalog and majors available online cause confusion amongst students of different schools. “For my SSE colleagues and students in general, there’s confusion about if people from the Fall 2019 and Spring 2021 cohorts should follow the flowcharts released last fall or the ones released this semester (confusion coming from the fact that different advisors and coordinators in SSE give different responses),” Oussama told me.
”Also, the new flowcharts for SSE (GE, CS, EMS) released this semester have different course requirements and prerequisites as the ones released last year (despite both being 2019-2021 catalog).”
Oussama Tlaghi, SHSS Mentor
The day before the preregistration of the majority of AUIers started in the outrage of advisors not giving/being able to give the clearance to respective students. It seems like some were not even on the lists of enrolled students. In short, the stress of this process was doubled and tripled by the number of different dimensions added. Observing this one wonders if the problems of communication and collaboration amongst concerned departments get bigger and bigger in every situation or at some point it will cease to exist, too?
