LETTER: Registration is still a pain

Editor,

I want to discuss how great the online QUAD runs. It works just fine almost year-round. The QUAD is a wonderful system for those who may use it frequently, but for the 90 percent of students who only use it during registration, the QUAD is an insult to our school’s image.

In the era of technological advancement, it seems that Utah State is pulling up the rear. Every time I see a set of kiosks during registration hours each student is there loading and reloading only to get the user capacity error. It is the same story in the computer labs; students wasting minute after minute to log on, just to have their hopes crushed when they suddenly are kicked off again. And for those students at home with a regular connection that don’t have high-speed Internet (like myself), chances are slim that you will be able to log in at all.

I am sure there are a few critics out there who will want to tell me that the reason the QUAD is so slow is because there are only so many people who can be on at once, or that our server isn’t large enough. That isn’t a good enough excuse. I surf the Web daily on many sites and servers and even the servers of other universities. Only at Utah State have I seen a user capacity error. The only error I am sure of is the school’s ability to provide a powerful enough system to host all of its students.

This year, instead of building more buildings for the engineering department, let’s pay the engineers to fix the online QUAD, something that will better each student’s life. If we are going to use technology to make our life more simple and our time more efficient, then the paradox of the simple online registration must change at Utah State.

Scott Paul