It remains unclear if the process will ever be simple, as students face another year of battling the ancient University system.
Every year towards the end of summer, University of Glasgow students wake up early to log on to the MyCampus portal, wait for a registration email that sometimes never arrives, and spend a whole day on a slow, archaic website that cannot handle the number of students on it at once. Simply selecting from a course catalogue on a website should not require so much time and effort, but Glasgow students have learned to not underestimate its difficulties.
Last year, I spoke to various students about their experiences with course enrolment. The unanimous response was that the website needs updating. Students struggled to put together schedules that worked for them because of MyCampus glitches, spending up to eight hours at a time trying to navigate the portal. Some worried they would not be able to get onto their course at all.
The University Transformation Team told The Glasgow Guardian about their programme called “Routes to Enrolment”, which aimed to radically transform the registration and enrolment experience for students. This included introducing ‘reserve capacities’ to ensure that students would get the modules required for their degree, and ‘block enrolment’ for staff to enrol students directly in some courses. However, were these changes ‘radical’ enough?
This year, enrolment was on 5 August at 9 am GMT, and according to students, they have not seen much progress. Nothing about the website layout itself is any different, and students have endured the same glitches and slow loading as the year before. Some have even experienced more complicated issues than last year.
Several second-year Law students mentioned that everyone in both Common Law and Scots Law were only informed three hours after enrolment began that they would not be able to enrol for four out of six mandatory courses until 10 August. The two classes they were supposedly able to enrol in that day came up saying that students had a missing component which had to be verified, but verification instructions were never uploaded.
One law student says – “One person out of the odd 200 figured out that we had to add the classes to our choices, and then change our preferences to get this mysterious admin component”.Many students, including her, called the helpdesk. She called three times and was put on hold for 15 minutes each time. No one on her course, that she knows of, got an answer.
Students in philosophy and chemistry had a similar experience; they were unable to enrol onto the courses required for their degree. “It just shows an error sign when you try to do anything,” a chemistry student says. A philosophy and history student adds: “It is genuinely appalling that it wasn’t more organised and that it wasn’t checked or confirmed to be working beforehand!”
“Websites like Amazon or Ticketmaster have much more traffic all the time; why is this website in particular so slow? There must be a way to reduce the lag and make it more user-friendly,” she said. The layout is poor, and it is unclear which buttons need to be clicked so that you are not sent back to where you started. She suggests that having different schools within the University enrol on different days might make the system less laggy, but an overall modernisation of the website would be more beneficial for all students.
Another philosophy student agrees: “Glasgow touts itself as world-class, but it has a subpar registration system that can’t handle the load of students trying to enrol.” He says that the University needs to invest in its own systems to stop this happening each year.
Students who took resits did not enrol with everyone else, and will have to wait until the end of August. They are at a disadvantage because most class times and electives will be full by the time they are allowed to enrol.
Errors happened throughout the University. A student in geology could not access anything and could not enrol on her own course; another student who wanted to take advanced German as an elective could not because she needed permission to take a non-beginner subject, and ended up taking an entirely different elective. A Politics senior honours student says that the new courses added this year were not even on the system on enrolment day.
The issue with this system is not only its inefficiency — it is that students are missing out on opportunities such as electives, or are unable to access components of their main course, which should be guaranteed to them on entry to the University. Delays with enrolment also cause difficulties for students who will need to take a second day off work to try to enrol again. Additionally, students in part-time work need to make suitable timetables for their managers to see, in order to schedule shifts in accordance with the next academic year. The University should understand that students do not have days and days to spend on a dysfunctional website.
As a member of the Russell Group, the University of Glasgow should be prioritising a better enrolment platform for its students. Students are going into debt or paying incredibly high fees to attend University, only for them to be met with a nightmarish process that does not ensure that they can access the necessary courses for their degree or a timetable that suits their needs.
