Southwestern College’s much-maligned WebAdvisor had meltdowns in late December and late January that affected legions of students who were bumped from class or added to over-enrolled classes. Problems continue, but college IT personnel insist corrections are coming.
Nadia Henning, who plans to apply to the nursing program, said she received a shocking e-mail shortly before the spring semester started.
“Dear SWC student, you were contacted yesterday regarding your CHEM 100 course. This e-mail serves as a follow-up and confirmation that you were enrolled in error. To correct the problem, you have been dropped from this course and moved back to your original position on the waitlist.”
“All this time I thought I was enrolled,” Henning said. “I paid, and right before class starts this happens. How am I supposed to progress? I can’t even apply for the nursing program without these science courses completed.”
On Dec. 26, a week before the compressed winter session and, a peak time for student registration, a WebAdvisor glitch caused the program to show classes across various sections as empty. Simultaneously, its automatic script alerted and sent out invitations to everybody on the waitlists to join the classes. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of students accepted. As a result, classes across all sections were over-enrolled. SWC’s IT deparment the error the very next day. The very next day the IT department discovered the error. Admissions was not made aware of the problem until Jan. 4 and began to wade through the information. Admissions employees were able to identify the affected students and placed them back on the waitlist in the same exact position as before the glitch.
Director of Admissions and Records Nicholas Montez said his department acted as promptly as possible.
“By the time we sorted through all of the data it was around the end of the week,” he said. “It was around the seventh or the eighth. We put them right back where they were. We made the decision that was fair, certainly with the students’ best interests in mind.”
Some of the adversely affected students said they did not see it that way. Henning said issues like these have set her back on her career track.
“If I had known earlier, I could have been looking for another section or even tried a different college that had space,” she said. “This will be the third semester and I can’t even get on a waitlist for biology 260 and I’m in good academic standing.”
Like many things in the technological sphere, it has been difficult to sort out the root of the problem. Systems and Programming Supervisor Everett Garnick said this program error leaves him feeling uneasy.
“This particular issue is one where there is no data out there to trace,” he said. “I wish we could diagnose it because when it is left hanging out there like that you think it might come back. I don’t know how to fix that part of it.”
This recent episode is the latest in a long line of WebAdvisor gaffes during the crucial beginning weeks of a semester. For many students putting together a school schedule is often a delicate balance of toggling work considerations along with the classes necessary to achieve their academic goals. Henning said there is no single thing that has a more pervasive impact on students than WebAdvisor’s functionality. Montes, who came to SWC from Grossmont College a year and a half ago, said the frequency of these issue are troubling and unfamiliar to him.
“You have hiccups at any place, but not like here,” he said. “Being here the challenges have been a little bit different as far as something coming up every semester. I look forward to working on things and not have this be an issue every semester. Every school is different and every school’s IT area is different in how they manage it, so I certainly do share the best that I can things that I bring from my past and things to be able to help the students.”
Garnick and his team of eight programmers whose job it is to tackle the why and the how behind WebAdvisor’s malfunctions said the problems are always evolving.
“The main problem is change,” he said. “Nothing ever stays the same. Everything might be working okay in the system and somebody changes a process in the admissions office and now they enter data a little bit differently and because of that the program may react and there are unforeseen circumstances. We constantly have things coming down from the U.S. Department of Education and the state requiring us to report things a little bit differently. Every one of those things as we implement the changes could cause problems.”
Montes said SWC has a unique relationship with some of the programs.
“SWC has a much longer history of using Colleague software products (WebAdvisor),” he said. “They were pretty much in on the ground floor. At Grossmont we didn’t go live with this product until 2008. We used an out-of-the-box, vanilla version of it with minor modifications, if any. Every time you do a modification and let’s say when there is an upgrade to the product, now you have to account for every modification along with that upgrade.”
Garnick said IT is working to simplify SWC’s modification-bloated program to help minimize issues going forward. He said he hopes the recent waitlist issue has been resolved, but he cannot be fully sure.
“We know what the problem caused,” he said, “but we don’t know what the cause of the cause was. We always go back and try to identify what went wrong so it won’t occur again, but sometimes there are no breadcrumbs to leave a trail for us.”