There was widespread confusion and panic this morning as UCD students attempted to register for the coming academic year. The registration process was due to open today, medical though no specific time was given by the UCD authorities. Many students began logging into the SIS web system from 6am onwards, only to be greeted with a message informing them that the server was busy. Attempts to refresh the page failed to have any effect.
Students took to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to see if others had experienced the same problem with their SIS accounts. Angry students flocked to the UCD Registry Facebook page to express their frustration with the process. Second year Law student Rebek’ah McKinney-Perry was among those who commented on the page, saying, “I have been attempting to register for almost four hours and cannot get past the welcome page. This is…beyond a joke.” Other comments painted a similar picture, with the majority of students claiming to have been struggling to access the system for several hours.
One final year Arts student said she did not understand how UCD had failed to prepare for the high volumes of online traffic that accompany annual registration. “It’s ridiculous that as one of the world’s top universities UCD isn’t equipped to deal with the kind of server traffic that is to be expected when a large number of students are registering…it really is unacceptable”. A third year Mathematical Science student pointed out that an institution like UCD should have a better system in place. “It’s a joke. They should have a queue system and better infrastructure for module registration, similar to the Ticketmaster website”.
Some students feel that the system should have been shut down when the problem was detected to allow the issue to be resolved. However, no such action was taken, causing many students to miss out on places in modules they wished to take next year as a result of the delays in accessing the registration system. One student commented that the system failure was “messing with people’s degrees”. Third year student Morgan O’Reilly, who contacted The College Tribune about his experience, summed up his feelings on matter saying, “I along with plenty others am going to be left with the leftover modules. Give me my education back”.
A message from the university regarding the situation was posted on the UCD website this morning, “Online Registration is experiencing heavy traffic at this time. You may experience delays accessing the system. We apologise for any inconvenience caused. Students are getting on and are registering, just slowly.” When contacted by The College Tribune for further comment on the matter, the UCD Registry office was closed for lunch.
This is not the first time this summer that UCD have experienced IT problems. A server crash in June resulted in closure of the application system for campus accommodation. It remained closed for a day while the IT department attempted to repair it.
by Sinéad Williams
Questions need to be raised here about the effectiveness of the UCD IT system. All of the universities 22,000 + email address and mailboxes have been outsourced to Google this summer so you would imagine that there would no be additional capacity on the system. Registration takes place 4 times a year, surely someone somewhere built this system in the first place so that it could accommodate the workload. Yet every semester at registration and results time we have problems.