I’m a Neuroscience student working on my undergraduate degree. In the last couple of years I’ve found that some parts of the registration process don’t work as well as they could.

Faculties have no way of measuring the demand for courses before registration opens, and so some years there are too many or too few sections of a course offered.

The format of the class search function on Carleton Central makes it very difficult to see which combination of possible courses would result in the best timetable, and there is no way to search for multiple specific courses.

My first suggestion would be to add an extra step in the registration process, two to four months before registration opens. Students would be asked which courses they want to take in the upcoming year. There should be a section for first choices and alternate choices.

To get the highest number of responses, it could be incorporated into the registration menu on Carleton Central.

Students could be given a reward for completing it in time, such as an earlier time ticket.

This extra option would benefit both the faculties, who are planning which courses to offer and wish to make a tentative budget, and the students, who would get the best course selection possible.

My second suggestion is to streamline the registration process itself. As it stands, students usually need four or five hours at least to examine the course selections and figure out a way to fit all their mandatory classes in their schedule.

With a few simple revisions, even first-year students will be able to register for classes without consulting anyone for help. One possibility would be to find a way to incorporate the degree audit and the class schedule to show specific categories of courses, and show the courses which would fit into the audit, as well as the times they are offered in the results page. This would be even better if classes for which a student lacks a prerequisite, or classes restricted to a certain year level were excluded from the search results.

Another possibility is to have the ability to search for multiple, specific courses at once. This way, students could search for, say, Biology 1003 and 2200 at the same time.

To streamline the registration process, students should have the option of saving course CRNs when they are exploring the schedule. Once the registration time-ticket is up, students would only have to go to the saved CRNs page and input them into their worksheet.

Madeleine Wilson
B.Sc. Neuroscience