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Unsurprising: Sophomore Does Advance Registration Extra Early, Still Gets Screwed Over

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Photo by Karman Cheema / The Daily Pennsylvanian

On the last day of every advance registration period, thousands of students flock to PennInTouch to make key last-minute changes to their schedules—or at least they try. Because of PennInTouch’s limited functionality, only a handful of people can ever be satisfied.

That’s why Rasheed Edwards (E '20) decided to act early. In previous semesters, he always got screwed over. But this time, he was going to be proactive.

Edwards selected his courses on the very first day he could and thought he had it all figured out. He got to the site so early that he was actually somehow able to open two tabs at the same time—an unprecedented experience for any PennInTouch user. To top it off, he even wrote a Python script to optimize the ordering of his classes!

But that didn’t matter much. He got screwed over yet again.

“This is getting kind of ridiculous now. I need seven courses if I want to graduate on time, and they only gave me two. One of them is ‘Hellenic Artistic Methods in the 4th Century BCE,’ and I definitely did not put that,” Edwards ranted.

When one of our UTB reporters asked the PennInTouch webmaster about why such a glitch in the mainframe existed, he got defensive.

“The student probably didn’t put his requests in on time. We also have this new feature where we randomly choose five students and give them courses not pertinent to their major whatsoever, and, in the process, don’t give them their other preferences. It keeps things interesting,” the webmaster explained.

Surely, students cannot wait for the day PennInTouch is replaced by Pennant in 2020. Let’s just hope that that isn’t coded on Scratch too.

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