Registrar's Offices Irons Out Glitches

The Registrar's new Web-based sectioning programs are now in place, and a few kinks have caused major problems in at least three courses this semester.

The programs, which forced several course heads to register hundreds of students by hand, should now be fixed, Registrar Arlene Becella said yesterday.

For the first two days of sectioning, the Expository Writing Program's Web site was unstable because the server was not prepared for so many students to log on simultaneously, according to program administrator Christina Grenier.

Many students could not get onto the program before it was turned off, and 200 first-years had to section afterwards on paper.

"In the future [the program] will run much better than it did the first time around," Grenier said.

Biological Sciences 10, "Introductory Molecular Biology" (BS10), also had problems with the new sectioning system, including lost entries and multiple crashes.

Course head TF Nicole King wrote in an e-mail message that she had to assign 290 students to sections by hand.

According to Becella, benefits of the new system will be more apparent next semester, as glitches are ironed out.

Over the past two weeks, 6,349 Harvard students in 40 courses sectioned via Web sites.

In its old system, the Registrar's Office did not have any record of how many sections each class had or how many people were in each section.

In the near future, FAS officials will be able "to use the sectioning information to make decisions about section sizes, the number of TFs needed for a course and the number of classrooms needed for a course and its section," Becella wrote in an e-mail message.

"Changes in student information--such as telephone number--could be reported by section to course head and TF and would help keep records up-to-date," she added.