Varied opinions on major changes to registration
In January 2024, the University of Regina (U of R) Student Affairs announced their plan to launch full-year class registrations at the U of R in March. The program was successfully launched in March 2024 allowing students to register for classes for an entire academic year.
According to the email sent out to the students, the goal was a consistent and long-term approach that better supports the academic goals of students and makes their lives easier and less stressful.
It has been about a month since the program was launched and the Carillon asked the students what they thought about it.
“I think it’s a good way for students to be able to plan their lives around classes. It’ll be nice to know what long-term jobs or opportunities someone can take up without gambling on whether it fits into their future schedule,” said Wren Magalong, a fifth-year student in Music Performance.
Emily Hultgren, a third-year student in music education thinks, “It’s nice to be able to plan out my full year, so I can commit to other things like work. In the past, my job has sometimes done scheduling before I know my class schedule and it’s prevented me from committing to shifts.”
Katherine Reid who is in the first year of her education program has similar feelings. “I think it’s a really good idea. I did a previous degree at the University of Saskatchewan that had full-year registrations and I found it really helpful to be able to just plan out my whole year all at once. […] I didn’t have to think about it after that. So I think it’s a really good change,” Reid said.
While some students thought full-year class registration helps them plan their lives better, others had different opinions. Alissa Sadler, a third-year sociology student told the Carillon that she finds “the new system makes things a little bit more confusing and complicated.”
“When I was signing up for next year’s classes, it definitely took me longer than I wanted it to because I had to actually manually switch the terms I was signing up for, which I didn’t remember [with half-year registration]. I also think it makes planning for what classes to take a little more stressful and time-consuming, especially because my time ticket was right around when I had some exams/papers to do. While I do think that it’s nice to get it all over with at once, I […] preferred the old system a bit more because I felt like it was easier for me,” Sadler explained.
Maliha Jabeen Khan is a fourth-year biology student who is nearing the end of her degree. Having spent quite a bit of her degree signing up for classes using the old system, she had insights about the pros and cons of the new system. “While having the registration open for the entire year makes us plan our classes out well in advance, sometimes it may not work out as things and schedules may change closer to when the semester starts and then there’s less flexibility to change courses, as those courses get filled up pretty quickly. In my opinion, choosing classes for two semesters works really well but maybe not for three semesters, especially if students want to make changes to their schedules,” Khan said.
