Owl Express actively down. Image Taken by Tye Brown | The Sentinel
As KSU student numbers explode upward, the university needs to get it together.
Registration is a stressful time for students and faculty alike. Classes fill quickly, advisors are booked and midterms loom over it all.
Ideally, registration and preparing for it should be a quick and painless process. However, it seems that KSU has different ideas even while its enrollment grows.
When students were cracking open their laptops during their designated time ticket, searching for Owl Express and pressing the link to open, they were met with a shock: “HTTP Status 500 – Internal Server Error” sprawled across their screens.
The initial crash began at 10:28 AM on Oct. 9 and lasted until around 11:15 AM, with new time tickets opening at 11:30 instead. Although short, it only added to the increased frustration of KSU students with campus resources.
Casey Koning, a frustrated student, said, “It’s an impossible challenge for KSU to make a campus and website that can handle all of the students they keep so graciously accepting.”
With the highest enrollment in the state of Georgia, it’s clear the students want to see a change.
Registration can make or break a student.
Not getting a class they need can hold them behind an entire semester, and not getting a good professor can have lasting impacts on their GPA.
Registration directly impacts a student’s future, and not everyone can be so lucky as to get early registration—especially freshmen.
Students at KSU need more organization and accountability for the portal error. Although the crash didn’t last long, it still hurt those registering and created a lot of unwanted stress, especially for those who couldn’t exactly wait around for it to open.
With the lasting impact it has, registration should be taken more seriously.
Students should be required to work with an advisor before registration, not only to make sure that they are on the correct path to graduating, but also to relieve the burden and stress of advisors right before registration.
Understandably, KSU wants its students to have autonomy, accountability and responsibility, but requiring all students to meet with an advisor would help relieve some of the stress.
Finally, registration itself needs to be more organized. With the university accepting more and more students each semester, there has to be a better way to organize registration for all students and increase awareness of the resources available to those who have struggled.
Some students aren’t even aware that they can view classes before their time ticket opens.
If issues like this keep happening, then what are student fees really doing for KSU’s IT department? Instead of being increased, these funds should be reallocated in a way that benefits students, especially on a day as important as registration.
Students shouldn’t have to put up with these issues because the university is too incompetent to provide better resources.
