Marist College does "pre-registration" for its classes via the web. It's "pre" in that the students pick the courses they want, without regard for session-limits, etc. Then, they impose the session limits, and classes that are overbooked are trimmed down according to who should have priority for those classes (e.g., is it in your major, are you a graduating senior, etc.)
Pre-registration was set to begin today. Since I got home late last night from bringing the parents home from JFK, I popped onto the Marist Student Intranet to see if I could register. Lo and behold, Spring'05 registration appeared to be live. So I went to register, and got an error message:
Student not eligible to register on the web
So, since I'd had my advisory meeting this semester (that meeting which actually enables you to use the online registration tools), I dropped the Registrar an e-mail, asking what I was supposed to do, because I wanted to pre-reg, and my advisor was out of town this week, etc., etc.
They responded back to me this morning, saying basically, "Registration opened at 7:30, you should be fine now." I went online, checked, and sure enough, was registered for my classes in about five minutes.
I jotted them a quick response back thanking them for the info, and suggesting jokingly, "I guess we should get that error message fixed for next semester, eh?"
I got a response back from them:
There was no error, the web wasn't opened at 12:39 am. Please always view the web for hours of availability.
I felt the need to respond (because, well, that's the kind of guy I am) indicating that the error message WAS wrong, it didn't say "You're a bonehead, registration isn't open at all" (describing a general condition affecting all users), it said "Student not eligible", describing a condition specific to me and that maybe the difference between the two would have prevented me from bothering them in the first place.
I can accept such "not understanding sentence meaning" type nonsense from the general rabble, but aren't the people running colleges supposed to, in theory, be educated a little bit more than average? Aren't they supposed to "get" that sort of thing?
You're registering for conflict management? :)
You're asking a college to make sense? They're not supposed to, it's in the Ferengi print on their contracts..... ;-)
I have a friend who was doing something similar - she was registering for some class for her Masters degree that she didn't realize she needed. But, the sucky part about this class was that it was only offered once every two years or something.
So, she found out about this, went to go register for the class - it was the last day. Apparently, whoever wrote the site wrote it with a GMT cutoff for time instead of local time. So, she was trying to register for her class at 8pm, and, of course, it was 1AM GMT time, so she couldn't register.
Fortunatly, she was able to get ahold of the right person and correct the problems.
It's kind of ironic, I guess. 20 years ago, Colleges were known for their technology, and probably had better technology than most of the businesses out there. Nowadays, they seem to have much worse technology (Often, it seems, the same technology from 20 years ago).
IMHO, looks to be catch-all error handling that was never refined as code development progressed? I think Tim is on to something; as technology in the "real world" has progressed, the demand for tech skills has grown (regardless of the economy and/or bubble burst), and companies would be willing to pay more than a college administrative position for requisite skills? Maybe the pay scale at the college hasn't been able to keep up, so you're stuck with the guys that can't yet land the "real coder" jobs out there? Or, even worse, you have to deal with the follies of someone that hasn't ever experienced real-world demands for properly-coded error handling b/c they've never made it out of the college mindset/workplace/whatever.
Either way, I think you're right... the pre-registration site should have properly indicated the specific failure.
But it doesn't necessarily reflect the level of education involved; it could indicate a level of desperation on the administration's part.
I work at a college, and trust me, I do a homer simpson impression by slapping my forhead and saying "DOH!" many times when I see stuff the people who maintain the online registration do. Unfortunatly the real techs are barred from interacting with that system. The software they use probably was not developed in house, and instead purchased. These vertical market solutions(can you call them solutions?) are usually very poor hacks to legacy systems. It's very unfortunate, but I don't even bother wasting my time bringing attention to the problems anymore. When I have done this in the past, it was not seen as "team play" in order to better over improve the complete system (which is was), but yet as a political attack to try to take over someone elses "area" (which it wasn't). These kind of situations persist in Higher Education, and the results surface as something as simple as the error Derek encountered.
Online Registration is an expensive hack made by the people that make our (Student|HR|Financial) information systems. And it's a poor hack at that. Imagine a bunch of mainframe only people maintaining middleware, made by mainframe only people on windows servers and designing webpages at the same time, and you will have a picture of what happens on the backend of that system. Now take a bunch of people that know their specific job function very well and never had to really stray from their little 'box' as far as thinking is concerned and you will have the frontend picture (Registrar and such).
Being one of the Server Admins at that college for the past 10yrs I can say that Tim is correct. Although this college has made some very good strides toward newer technologies, the global computing culture has not changed much. Some admins still have thier 'I AM GOD' personas that they were afforded back in the day when they truly were the only ones that understood the technology. And when you think you are 'GOD' whateever you give the people is good enough and doesn't need to be changed.
Good lord I need a new job.