SCORE site glitches delay some junior fall course selections

The problems, which affected "a limited number" of members of the junior class, prevented students from selecting courses in SCORE for the first five minutes after registration began at 7 a.m., OIT Associate Chief Information Officer and Support Services Director Steven Sather said in an interview.

Some students, however, noted that the problems lasted for much longer. Matt Sanders '09 said he called OIT at 7:37 a.m. to find out the nature of the problem and was told that the problem would persist until 8:20 a.m.

Megan Chiao '09 said she was able to log in but received an error message while trying to submit her course selections and was not able to successfully enroll in any courses for her first few attempts.

It "was really annoying," Chiao said. "I thought there was something wrong with my computer."

Students who were affected by the glitches were not necessarily prevented from enrolling in their desired classes.

"I didn't get locked out of any classes that I wanted because of it," Sanders said. "But if I had been registering for classes that had been more competitive to get into then ... it probably would have been a problem."

"OIT and the Registrar received reports that between 20 and 30 students were not able to successfully register for one or more classes," Sather said in an e-mail.

For many other juniors, though, SCORE did not pose any problems and they were able to register successfully in the morning.

"I didn't experience any difficulties. I just woke up, enrolled, and it worked," Richmond Owusu '09 said.

The issue was caused by a "problem in the underlying software that runs the registration system," Sather explained in the interview, adding that OIT has "never encountered this problem before during registration."

OIT staff spent the rest of the day attempting to both determine the exact cause of the issue and repair it before registration for the Class of 2010 begins Wednesday, Sather said.

"We have some slight ideas [as to the source of the glitch], which we will be further investigating," Sather said.

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Some juniors scrambled to various computer clusters on campus, only to find that the problem affected individual accounts independent of the computer used. Some students who did not experience glitches said that the system was slower this morning than it had been during previous registration sessions.

"It took me longer [to register for courses on SCORE], but I eventually got all the classes I wanted to sign up for," Andrew Bluher '09 said. "It was annoying because I had to reenter a lot of information. It took me about 25 minutes or so even though I started exactly when [registration] opened."

"For the next registration period, we will have OIT technical staff watching the system closely, and if we see any problems developing we will immediately correct those problems," Sather said.