PRESTO Remains Difficult
  
by Adrian Leung

With registration winding down, students and faculty can ignore PRESTO until April. Some enjoy the newest web-based registration system. Others despise it.
One problem faculty run into with PRESTO concerns the differentiation between consent and non-consent seats in classes. This created havoc when students dropped out of classes with large waitlists. A professor could grant consent to students on the waitlist, but since the seats weren’t necessarily reserved, other students, without consent, continued to register for the class.
PRESTO’s main purpose is to provide software that combines files that were previously separate. “In 1997, we started a process where all of our administrative computing software, that includes finance, personnel, human resource, financial aid, student records, software, would be accessible together,” Director of Information Technology John Bucher said.
Before PRESTO, College programmers constructed the registration system. Four years ago the College moved away from that system, purchasing a software package named Banner from a leading software provider for institutions of higher education, Systems in Computer Technology. PRESTO is the registration module inside of Banner.
Bucher and the Director of Administrative Computing Monica Wachter said that the problems professors have with PRESTO are not representative of technical problems in Banner. “That [problem with consent seats] is something that needs to be addressed with the registrar specifically, because the registrar controls when a class goes to consent, course by course, usually that’s in agreement with the faculty member. It’s not a technical difficulty as far as we know,” Wachter said.
According to the Registrar, Lori Gumpf, the protocol of consent has not changed. “Consent is no different in PRESTO than it’s ever been. If instructors choose the composition of classes, then they used add/drop cards. With the most recent registration system prior to Banner, students were given Class Access Numbers [which they had to enter into the register program]. Going onto PRESTO, we started with CAL labels. Introducing the web to faculty, they had the option of granting consent themselves or filling out consent cards. It’s the faculty’s responsibility to talk to the chair of the department who relates it to the registrar,” Gumpf said.
In order for a class to be listed in the supplement as requiring consent, professors must notify the chairpersons of their departments before mid-January. 
Some students were upset that PRESTO did not tell them when a class required consent, while others had more personalized problems. Junior Benjamin Gleason had both. “PRESTO’s a pain for me as an English major because it doesn’t let you register for 200 level classes if you’ve already taken 300 level courses. It also seems to screw with people’s minds on the Look-Up Courses to Add screen, where it invariably lists open seats in the class that exist in the cyber-realm only, not in Oberlin,” Gleason said.
Other students like PRESTO a lot. Senior Brooks Daverman said, “I like PRESTO because it is all online so there is no need for physically walking around. You do it online. The school I went to freshman year we registered with the teachers all at booths and you had to wait in line then rush around. Insanity.”
Bucher and Wachter pointed out different factors that help complicate the adaptation of consent into a registration system. “Some faculty members want to control the class composition very carefully. It’s not as severe as completely handpicking the class. But because there are complicated rules, and because there aren’t as many classes as students who want to take them, they want to reserve certain seats for certain kinds of students. If the rules that a faculty member has are too complicated, then they go to consent,” Wachter said.
The limited number of seats due to the diversity of classes also creates a dilemma. “Another problem is the access. We have a very diverse curriculum. And we have a lot of students who want to choose from that, yet we don’t have the space for the number of sections to provide for all of those people. OC has a rich curriculum, which is good, but often times, satisfying that, we can only have one section of this, or that,” Bucher said.
Daverman offered numerous possible improvements. “I have heard teachers grumble about PRESTO, especially one time when a teacher said that after he gave consent, he didn’t know who he had given consent to. It would be nice if the teachers could see that, and it would also be nice if there was an integrated way to get consent on the PRESTO site. Another cool thing would be if there was a waiting list that you could be put on if you didn’t get a class, while you were registering, and that waiting list would feed you in as soon as a space opened up. That way people would get on the waiting list based on seniority, not who went to talk to the professor first,” he said.