By Ashley Mussbacher (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: September 18, 2013
With the tuition deadline right around the corner, the last thing any student wants to worry about is registration complications.
Wait-listed students lucky enough to snag a seat used to go through the process of registering by filling out a permission to register form, getting it signed by the instructor, and then taking it to the registration office in Alumni Hall.
However, Office of the Registrar (OReg) has newly implemented an online process that is completely paperless.
According to their website, the instructor must log into myUFV and enter the student’s ID number to grant him or her access into the course. As handy as this is, the student still needs to go to OReg to make it official, a step of which some students are not aware.
Aleah Weston, a student at UFV, says both she and her instructor were confused about the process when they tried using the online sign-up for the first time.
“He said in 24 hours, I’ll be let into the class. When I signed in later, I still didn’t see anything. By this point it had been 24 hours,” she says.
Weston explains that when she emailed the instructor he suggested she pay her tuition, and perhaps then it would register her, but she was skeptical.
“How am I supposed to pay my tuition for this one class that I’m not even registered in? As far as I knew, it was supposed to show up in myUFV,” she says.
When she went to OReg to sort things out, the staff member knew what the issue was before Weston fully explained the situation.
“[She] cut me off in the middle of my sentence, and said, ‘Oh, yeah, I know what you’re talking about,’” she says, noting that after a couple clicks the problem was fixed.
Weston concludes by saying that the new system should have been better communicated to prevent students from panicking.
“If there’s a change to how things work, it should be explained better so I’m not sitting there freaking out,” she says. “I want to pay my tuition. I want to get things organized.”
Getting admitted into a class electronically is not the only issue students ran into.
Brandi Watts, another UFV student, claims the new online Interac payment option was not working.
“The link was broken,” she explains, adding that she asked for help from information and technology services, but was told “nobody else had such complaints as [hers].”
The IT Help Desk does not have any information regarding students’ issues with the registration or payment process.
Eventually Watts was able to sort out the situation and make it into her class, but still feels the issue was dealt with poorly.
“Honestly, [I received] no apologies, no accountability, or anything,” she says.
Despite all the issues students found with registration, it seems that OReg is unaware. Deputy registrar Darren Francis had no comment except to say, “I asked our staff and not one complaint about this issue has been received by OReg.”
