Remove the registration restriction

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Remove the registration restriction
Students begin registering for classes Monday. Nicole Ault | Collegian

Some students thrived in the stress of registration week, but most of us were uneasy for our uncertain fate.

Come registration day, you probably slept for four hours, got one of the classes you wanted, and ended up with many professors to email and a mess of scheduling to deal with. A small slip up — a failed alarm clock, a failure to line up registered classes in time, a blip in the Wi-Fi — can transform your next-semester schedule from a dream to a nightmare.

Even your academic adviser forgetting to lift your registration ban can have grave consequences — and this situation isn’t that uncommon.

The adviser meeting before registration is required for all Hillsdale students, especially since students can’t register until their adviser lifts restrictions on their WebAdvisor account. This system of adviser-controlled registration bans puts responsibility that should belong to the students on the advisers.

Every semester, I hear stories about different registration ban fiascos. Professors just don’t have the investment in class scheduling that their advisees do. Some advisers forget to lift the ban after the adviser meeting. Others don’t remember how to work the system, and they don’t lift the ban in time. By the time a student emails about a standing ban and gets a response, his or her sought-after classes could be gone for the semester.

If all that was at stake was the surface issue of “oh, you didn’t let me register first before all of my other classmates,” my problem with the current system could be seen as merely selfish. But the truth is that it should be the students’ choice how far they are willing to go to get his classes. The students decide whether or not they are going to wake up at an ungodly hour to register. It’s each student’s choice to determine how important the classes are to them, and the registration ban just doesn’t provide an environment for that sort of adult control.

Legally, college students are adults. We are trusted with our own jobs, health, and cars. We are trusted to do homework and accept the consequences of our actions, whether good or bad…but we’re given a restriction on class registration, which seems arbitrary and unnecessary.

The ban seems to serve no purpose besides incentivizing students to show up for adviser meetings. Does the ban exist so advisers can prevent students from taking too many or too few classes? If so, it isn’t much use. There isn’t anything stopping students from dropping or adding classes through WebAdvisor after their adviser meetings.

Students who really don’t care about their classes will suffer the consequences one way or another, whether through terrible classes or terrible grades in classes. The registration restriction doesn’t make a bad student get his life together, and it doesn’t do anything for a good student.

In life, we’re going to suffer from other people’s consequences as well as ours. But the registration ban insults hardworking, grown-up students while not providing much of a deterrent for lazy ones. I’m not discounting professors’ superior knowledge — my own academic adviser has been beyond helpful with me. But we shouldn’t shift this responsibility on them. Ultimately, class scheduling is most important to the student.

Let’s continue having contact between advisers and students, while not forcing both parties to deal with the adviser-controlled ban. At the very least, it’ll give us students one less thing to worry about during the hellishness of registration week.

 

Katarzyna Ignatik is a sophomore studying English.