I just got an unsolicited email from “A group of highly motivated BU students.” Informing me that, for the low price of just $3.99 I can have RegAssist notify me of open seats in overbooked classes.
Shouldn’t the University be the ones helping students to get the classes they need?
I’ve been unimpressed with the registration system at BU. I don’t know if things are different for the undergrad classes (I suspect not), but the law school requires that students sign up for their desired classes in advance of any actual registration. There’s some sort of electronic system that then assigns classes (fairly, I presume) to each student based on those desired.
Such a system sounds great to me… if students were allowed to pick alternative classes for the event that they do not get into their first choices. Instead, we’re forced to sign up for the maximum number of credits and then drop those classes that we don’t need. The biggest problem with that is that the period in which students can drop classes does not begin until after the tuition costs are calculated and charged. If you’re “lucky” enough to get all the classes you signed up for, you have extra fees for those extra units, which you can’t recoup until much later. Of course, this always happens at the beginning of a semester, right as rent is due.
Regarding ResAssist, I don’t know whether I should be happy that students have taken it upon themselves to create a more efficient registration system (or at least a component of one) or bothered to see another for-profit enterprise stepping into an educational institution to fill a void that shouldn’t be there in the first place. I think I’m leaning towards the latter.
There is one thing I like about the BU registration system: it shows you pictures of all your professors. There’s a trade off for that though: your professors all get pictures of you.