I have been sitting here contemplating various aspects of my college career thus far for the past few hours. After careful analysis there is nothing truely odd about my experiences, with the exception of any interaction I have had with the UNCC registrar.
In the time I have been interacting with this registrar I have managed to bypass 2 proccesses. The first bypass was in June when I was supposed to be stuck at SOAR for 2 days. When my records were being modified a few days before SOAR the registrar/admissions office managed to make a strange flaw appear that essentially released all flags and holds on my account, this should have not happened at all. I registered before SOAR even began, again, this is abnormal and should have never occured. I am inclined to believe that this flaw was directed by fate to comply with my declaration of “UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES WILL I STAY IN A UNCC DORM”, of course that declaration applied only to situations where it would be mandatory and I was not comfortable with the campus. I went to SOAR when I was scheduled to, for the first day of it, and was assigned to a group, but the Orientation Counselleor left be behind before we even got started (lets start Scared Freshman Syndrome right). I was assigned to another OC for the first part of the orientation, but unfortunately I had already seen enough of UNCC’s hospitality by that point. I was told by many people, the DOS (Dean of Students) included, that SOAR was important, but in the time i was there i was neither impressed nor enlightended. If anything I learned not to trust the DOS [for my nerd friends, you can pretty much guess how I felt about her before I met her because of her acronym]. The DOS lied to me about various things that morning during SOAR. The DOS is supposed to be someone that students can count on, go to and seek for comfort with most issues. Strangely, the department of admissions was much more friendly, caring and helpful with everything I have needed since the day i first sent my application, even though that department is trained to look at students as only numbers. However, the department of admissions has its flaws, including their neglegence with records. I had to visit them 3 times to get an isssue corrected where all of my transfer credits went missing for a few days, even after my record was manually reconstructed.
Next topic, Prerequisits! UNCC uses a tool called Campus Pipeline to manage registrations, drop/add, and records management on the student side. This tool has to be the stupidest thing I have ever seen. To get a course that has a prerequisit at UNCC you must only add the prerequisit to the schedule for the semester, then perform a conditional drop-add with the course you want and the course is granted completely and without question of the system. I haven’t tested this to a level of multiple successive pre-requisits, but because of the way it functions I would assume that it would be exactly the same. This is a flaw that could harm the integrity of the institution if some students who just wanted to complete their degree and leave started using it to get into courses for the purpose of getting a C and moving on. Upon anylizing the situation I find fault with my own usage of it, but what is done is done now. I used the procedure to bypass a topic area that I was complete SICK of, ALGEBRA! After having 3 years of it, I am tired of it and dont want to look at it again. In high school I was determined to be competent enough to take AP Calculus, which is equivilent to UNCC’s Non-Engineering Calculus. Also, I managed to complete AP Statistics and get credit at UNCC for it, Statistics is equivilent to Calculus in pre-requisits. My competency in math isn’t the point here though, the point is that pre-reqs should be enforced better than they are by the UNCC registration system. At CPCC there is a very tight registration procedure that verifies pre-requisits. One thing I also noticed about the registration system that shouldn’t have happened (although it didn’t affect me directly) is the handling of courses that require registration permits. One of the philosophy courses I am taking next semester required me to have a registration permit by departmental rules, but there were no notes or anything on the record for the course to state as such, but in this situation I had my permit in place (Thanks Dr. Presler, youre the best) before registration was opened. There are only 7 people registered for the course, none of which I know, so I can’t confirm that, but typically, if there is no note, then there is no catch.
The thing I hate most is having to worry about when Campus Pipeline is up and when it is not. It only maintains records for 18,000 people, it shouldn’t need to be down for 6 hours every day of the week for maintainance and record backups. Seems weird and inefficient to me, but then again, I don’t have to deal with the back end of the records system…at least not yet.
I will continue to monitor my records to make sure that everything stays correct until I graduate, but the records system at UNCC still scares me.