A new course-planning tool seems to have made it easier to plan for advanced registration, which begins today for fall classes.
Launched on March 17 on Penn InTouch and PennPortal, the program allows students to search for courses based on several criteria, including course name, instructor, status, starting time and the requirement the course fulfills.
After searching, students can add potential classes to their "course cart" and create mock schedules.
According to Dean of Freshman in the School of Arts and Sciences Janet Tighe, students have been coming into advising sessions, color-coded mock schedule in hand, well-prepared to discuss their plans for next semester.
"These are students who are really planning what next year's schedule is going to look like and making informed decisions about courses," Tighe said.
Many students said the new program made it easy to avoid time conflicts.
"I like how you can select all of the different times of a class, then see how they conflict with or support your other classes, and pick the best one," Engineering freshman Lisa Zheng said.
Students also stressed that the new system is convenient and less time-consuming than planning a schedule by hand.
According to College junior Sandy Pillalamarri, the most useful part of the program is that "it made figuring out what classes fulfill what sector requirements much easier."
But others said that the new tool did not eliminate the necessity of opening multiple browser windows to plan a course schedule.
"It could be improved on," College freshman Jenna Russell said. "I still had the professor-rating site, the registrar site and the College requirements site all open, and I spent time trying to decide which classes fulfill what."
Students still need to actually register for courses on Penn InTouch, and several students suggested that the administration find a way to integrate course selection into the registration system.
Last week, when the system went live, e-mail announcements went out to more than 7,500 undergraduates and more than 4,800 graduate students, Regina Koch, IT technical director of Student Registration and Financial Services, wrote in an e-mail.
She added that almost 4,000 students have logged into the system, with about 2,000 creating mock-schedules.
"I'm extremely pleased with the way the system came out," said College junior and class vice president Anthony Maggio, who has worked on the project.
Maggio said he plans to continue working to develop more features and improve the functionality of the system over the next year.
