Wednesday, Feb. 14, College of William and Mary Associate Provost and University Registrar Alana Davis sent out a campus-wide email announcing the implementation of PATH as a new registration software replacing the previous Banner 9 System.
In PATH, students have a period of time to submit a cart of desired classes and alternatives and the system processes these preferences to automatically create schedules. The system also implemented a waitlisting model, allowing students to enroll in a limited list to join classes if spaces became available.
With the new PATH registration system, the Office of the University Registrar is able to see a complete list of student preferences and the exact demand for each course. The Flat Hat spoke with the Registrar’s Office to discuss the outcome of the new registration system and the data it created.
The switch to PATH was largely motivated by the need to move away from Banner’s time-dependent registration.
In the fall of 2021, the Banner 9 registration system crashed as students all logged in at once to register for their spring classes. Under the first-come, first-enrolled system used in Banner, students are incentivized to log in immediately at the beginning of the registration period. Each social class was assigned a different registration day, and each class was divided into two time slots to minimize the traffic on the banner website. But even with this distribution, there would still be around 800 students assigned to each slot, all logging in at the same time.
According to Senior Network Engineer and Student Technology Advisory Council Chair Mary Bull, the Banner 9 website received nearly 700 clicks per second at the moment the add/drop period opened for the spring 2022 semester. This demand was beyond the capabilities of the server, resulting in frequent crashes while students raced to enroll for classes.
“There has been no problem this severe in IT or as long running in the time that I have worked here — so this was like a top level, tier one severity problem” Bull said.
IT had been pushing for a change of registration system for years, but after dividing each social class in two time slots did not remedy the server outages in 2021, IT made a stronger recommendation to the Office of the Registrar to move away from Banner 9.
“[IT] talked to the registrar and said the way that you have the system set up right now, when you combine that with our software system, it cannot support it,” Bull said. “IT had a big part of the push.”
Unlike Banner’s time dependent system, PATH processes students’ course demand algorithmically using randomly assigned order by descending social class. PATH will attempt to register all social class seniors for their first priority course in this random order, and if there is a registration error it will attempt to register for the student’s alternative course, then their second choice course, until each student is registered for one class. The system will then snake backwards from the end of the randomly assigned order to the beginning, repeating the process with the second choice courses. This process is repeated back and forth until all seniors have attempted registration for all of the courses in their carts. This is repeated for juniors, sophomores and freshmen, and final course schedules are then released to students.
In Banner 9, failed registration attempts as well as requests and issuances of professor overrides, were not recorded. The other primary motivation given for switching to PATH was that the new system produces data containing a complete record of students’ course preferences, including courses that students were unable to register for.
“Part of the data that was so important for us to gather from this was for us to see in the moment, what people were prioritizing and trying to get into for courses,” University Registrar and Associate Provost Alana Davis said.
“There are classes with not a huge number of seats and a lot of requests. There is a history and gender, sexuality and women’s studies class, The Queer South. […] I think it was the number one difference between people attempting to register for the class and seats available,” Davis said.
“No matter how good PATH works, if 250 people are ranking a class first and there are five seats open, whether it’s PATH or Banner, five people were getting into that class at that moment,” Davis said. “The mechanism was operating the same, It’s just people’s ownership that felt like it was pulled away.”
Failed registration data allowed Arts and Sciences and the Office of the Registrar to manually adjust the size of some courses in order to best match student preferences in the time between when preference carts were submitted and schedules were posted.
“The processing of the schedules happened multiple times, and we would look at the results in a room and we would sit with one of the assistant deans in Arts and Sciences and say, we could add five more seats in this class, right? Five more people might get their first choice,” Davis said. “We can’t do that in the moment with students actively registering.”
This registration cycle also implemented a new waitlist system enabling students to join waitlists for full courses. This change removed the ability for professors to individually issue maximum capacity overrides to students who wished to join full courses.
According to Bull, it is not possible for the registration software to use both maximum capacity overrides and waitlists.
“Waitlisting is preferable from an IT point of view because it can function automatically and it doesn’t require a lot of manual intervention by professors, which was very time consuming for them,” Bull said.
“It was one decision to implement PATH and a different decision to implement waitlists,” Davis said. “And the reason that that decision was made was for equitable access to courses that were full.”
Davis described potential inequities in access to professor overrides.
“You may have first generation college students who don’t know that you can reach out to faculty members in the same way, first year students who don’t know that you can reach out to a professor the way that a senior may,” Davis said.
The removal of professor issued maximum capacity overrides has been controversial, with students expressing concerns about losing the ability register for essential courses. Davis addressed this concern, and announced that in the upcoming registration period students will gain access to waitlists by social class. This gives upperclassmen the ability to join waitlists early, giving them a better chance of getting into classes they need to graduate.
“I do think it’s fair to have the critique that maybe an incoming student shouldn’t be ahead of me when I’m a graduating senior and I need this class to graduate. That’s also an equity issue, which is why I think we’re making some of these adjustments,” Davis said.
During this registration cycle, 4,111 notifications were sent out to students on waitlists alerting recipients that space had opened up and they were now able to register for their desired courses, in 1,940 of those instances, the student registered off of the waitlist.
Waitlists also allowed academic departments to monitor the overall demand for individual choices and make on the fly adjustments when space was available in the classroom.
“I think that [the Office of the Registrar] was also surprised by how many [Arts and Sciences faculty members] asked us ‘I hear that I have this many people on my waitlist — how can I get some of them into my class?’ and it was as simple as if you have the room and you want to let ten more people in — tell us that we can raise the capacity by 10, and 10 more people come off the waitlist.” Davis said.
Eleanor Grant ‘25 is a public policy major who expressed frustration with the loss of maximum capacity overrides.
“The waitlist system was a little annoying over the summer because you would have waitlists 20 people long and classes you really needed just wouldn’t be available until the waitlist closed down right when the semester started,” Grant said.
Davis emphasized that in emergency situations, students who are unable to register for essential classes are able to work with the Office of Undergraduate Academic Affairs to remedy their schedule issues.
“I think ultimately the goal would be that you have less and less need of that as time goes on, because we’re building better parts, we’re building better schedules that don’t create challenges for students,“ Davis said. “Because we’re not going to let students not graduate because they couldn’t register for a class. That’s not going to happen.”
Bull noted that there was a higher rate of registration software interaction at William and Mary due to frequent tweaking of schedules.
“One thing we can see from IT that’s reflective of the William and Mary student body is that William and Mary students are interacting with the registration system far more than student bodies at other universities,” Bull said. “PATH is also used by schools like Brown and Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, and they register a far fewer number of interactions per student than William and Mary. I think there is a connection to the underlying places where classes aren’t available.”
Looking toward the next registration cycle, the Office of the Registrar is receptive to student feedback.
“We’ve done two open forums where we’ve invited students, and we have taken what students have told us and are making some changes,” Davis said.
Davis also mentioned that the Office would be creating new strategic cart building resources ahead of registration for the spring semester. During this cycle, PATH recorded failure to register due to 947 field of study errors, 557 prerequisite or test score errors and 1046 instructor permission errors. These errors prevented students from being registered for their first priority classes and were potentially preventable.
Of the 5,420 undergraduate students eligible to create carts in the spring registration period, 5,621 students submit carts during the registration window.
I think it is a huge success actually to massively and completely change the format in which a student registers, and 97% of the students went through the process that they needed to go through,” said Davis.
Grant expressed preference for Banner 9 compared to the newer PATH system as of now.
“I don’t think PATH is all bad, there are just functions of Banner that I think a lot of us are used to relying on,” Grant said.
Davis reflected on the transition and some dissatisfaction from the student body.
“We did a lot to attempt to communicate what to expect to students, and I think that until you have experienced it, it’s just challenging to know and to feel the loss of control when you did things one way, one time and then it works out differently another way. But in the end, do I think it will ultimately be a better experience for students? Very much so,” Davis said.
