As registration for Winter Quarter begins today, the registrar’s office has assured that CAESAR will not see the same problems as it did during New Student Week.
Northwestern staff and PeopleSoft, the software vendor that produces CAESAR, have been working since September to fine-tune the system, said the university registrar, Suzanne Anderson. A PeopleSoft consultant also will be on site this week to resolve any problems with the program.
“I really believe we’ll be fine next week,” Anderson said Friday. “We’ve done a lot of good debugging and put in a lot of good effort from the software vendor, as well as from within Northwestern.”
The registrar’s office also hopes to take advantage of new functions allowed by this summer’s update to CAESAR, Anderson said.
Possible new functions include cross-listing classes offered by multiple departments and the return of “what-if” degree planning, which allowed students to see what classes they would need to complete a hypothetical major or minor.
A number of students were upset when the degree-planning function was not incorporated into the update, said Dan Broadwell, an Associated Student Government senator on the group’s Academic Committee, which has worked with the registrar’s office to improve CAESAR.
Automatic registration also could be available soon, said Jordan Fox, a senator for Hobart House and Rogers House who also serves on the committee. Fox, a Communication freshman, said in the future students could pick a list of desired classes and backups, and CAESAR would automatically register them.
Fox said watching her friends struggle with registration in September motivated her to work to improve the system. She doubts CAESAR will crash again but advises students to be prepared.
“The odds are 10:1 we won’t have it crash again, but it’s possible,” Fox said.
No matter how stable the system might be many students will use the new CAESAR for the first time. The registrar has posted a tip sheet and help number on the CAESAR site, and computer labs will be available for users who have difficulties. The help number is 847-467-4877. Students also can pre-empt problems using Internet Explorer instead of other browsers, Anderson said.
But some argue that CAESAR has problems a tip sheet can’t fix. Computer science and journalism Prof. Brian Dennis said the system’s interface simply is counterintuitive.
“It’s OK if you’re computer-sophisticated and can manage it, because you’ve seen a million interfaces that look like it and are just as bad,” Dennis said. “But I fear for the people who are not very technologically sophisticated.”
Many of the system’s labels don’t make sense, and basic tasks take too many steps, Dennis said.
“The interface does not reflect common usage,” he said. “If they did a better job of seeing how people use it on a daily basis … it would be a big improvement.”
Altering CAESAR is not a simple task, Anderson said. The university has limited power to alter PeopleSoft’s software.
“Because this is an enterprise-wide system, we couldn’t just do somebody’s project,” Anderson said. “It’s connected to everything. It talks to WildCARD, it talks to Ph. It really is a system that needs to be totally integrated.”
