Suck Ass Registrar Shitheads

The BBQ Pit
1

That’s actually what they call the registrar’s office where I work–the students, anyway. Its official name is unknown but they do go by the abbreviation SARS (!)

And that’s how they’re regarded, as a foul loathsome disease who makes students wait on line for days only to tell them that they’re on the wrong line, or they need some piece of paper to be signed before they bring it to the window, or that they’ve mixed up the student’s record with someone else and the student has officially been dropped from classes for non-payment of tuition bills, and on and on. The students hate the arrogant paper-pushers.

Faculty, much less so, mainly because we have only occasional involvement with SARS, but we hear the complaints all the time.

But now that they’ve fucked me over, I’m hopping mad. Some shit-for-brains assigned one of my current classes the numerical designation of some other class, so our rosters got merged and all the class information got totally screwed up. Worst of all, once we figured out the nature of the screwup and a new separate class was created, none of my students were officially enrolled in my section anymore.

At first they told me all my students would have to reregister, but I foresaw that then there would be problems and my students would be socked for late-registration fees, etc. so I told me “Forget it. You screwed up, you assigned the wrong number, you can fix it.”

Next they told me, “Okay, professor. Just copy all the students’ names and social security numbers from one piece of paper to another, and we’ll reregister them.”

Again, I said “No way.” I mess up a single digit and they’ll be telling me that it’s my fault for messing up the student’s registration. Most maddening of all, of course, was the fact they had the student’s name and information already registered on the computer -generated piece of paper they wanted to spend 45 minutes copying by hand. I informed them that, whatever else happened, the planet would shrivel and die before I ever copied a piece of paper that they were perfectly capable of generating another copy of.

A month into the term, they still haven’t given me a roster with my students on it. I’ve informed my chairperson and the dean of the reason I may not be able to enter grades. I also told them that I would refuse to enter any grades until the SARS office gave me a complete roster to fill them out on, and I’ve promised my students that if I don’t get some action from SARS very soon, they are all getting A’s in the course for being jerked around like this, so not to worry if they get notices from SARS saying they’re all short 3 credits.

Of course I’ve spent far more time fighting with these shitheads than I would have spent copying the roster and SS#s, but it’s the principle – these shitheads who pull this stuff on students are finally dealing with someone with total job security who isn’t about to do what they tell him to do, when this situation was caused by their inept paper-pushing in the first place. I hope someone gets fired over this, because it sure ain’t going to be me.

2

You’re my hero.

The registrar’s office was one of those places I hated to visit when I was in school, for many of the reasons you mentioned. Once I took a class that could be either a politics or journalism class and they misregistered me such that the class went toward my major instead of my secondary area of concentration. Took damned near 6 months to get it worked out. And all somebody had to do was edit a record in a database to get it fixed. If it wasn’t fixed, I wouldn’t have graduated.

I’ve heard so many registrar’s office nightmare stories over the years that sometimes I wonder if the folks that work in such places are aware of how badly they can screw somebody with a misplaced digit or other clerical boner.

3

Bless you.

Ours is just as bad. In fact, it’s so awful, that starting sometime mid-March,I’m going to check every week with the King Registar to make sure they have my file complete and I’m getting my degree. They have fucked me over so much the past four years (including a complication that could mess up at least one grad school oppurtunity…) that I have absolutely ZERO faith in them. Or anybody at Woody Hall–that’s where Student Accounts and Financial Aid is also housed. In fact, last Fall I had debt collectors sending me notices because Financial Aid sent them info that I graduated Jan 2004 (I’m graduating this May) and they WOULDN’T FIX IT! I requested four times, and it never got fixed. So I went in and freaked out–not very mature or adult of me, but I tell you what, it got fixed that day.

4

You know what? It wasn’t financial aid who sent the bad info, of course.

It was the Registrar. They wouldn’t fix the issue either. I think it was somebody in financial aid who ultimately called Sallie Mae for me.

5

Being someone who works in university admin (not Registry, admittedly) I might just add that you are actually all working for the same institution - there doesn’t need to be a battle between academic and admin departments.

There are reasons that they have asked for info - and there might be very good reasons why you should not be providing it. Surely a dialogue is better than the stand-off that’s been created.

Oh, and as a quality/standards person - suggesting that all the students get As as a result is presumably hyperbolic, as such an action bears no relation to their achievement.

6

Excellent job. While the academic atmosphere and the spirit of inquiry make my grad school an extremely pleasant place to study, the whole administration can, at times, turn it into a nightmare. The undergrads are being slugged over 30 grand a year, and this school can’t even implement a system-wide change of address. No, you have to go to the Registrar’s Office, and the library, and you department, etc., etc.

We also seem to have one particular practice in common with your university, to wit:

In these days of rampant fraud and identity theft, it’s a fucking scandal that universities still use students’ social security numbers as an everyday form of identification for registration and other administrative tasks. And i definitely don’t think that professors need access to, or should have access to students’ social security numbers.

Sure, i know that the school needs to have each student’s SSN in the system, for a variety of reasons, but it seems that no-one has taught them the principles of relational database management. Each student’s SSN could be associated in the system with a unique, university-generated student number, and then this number could be used for things like registration. Hell, my own student card has two unique numbers on it, loooooong numbers that differentiate me in the system from every other student in the university, and yet i still have to use my SSN every time i need to register or do some other crappy admin procedure. It’s bizarre.

My university recognizes the problems associated with using the SSN. Hell, so does the government. It’s now against the law to post student grades in public places using the SSN as an identifier. And my school has been saying for the past four years that they are “moving away from” the use of SSNs in everyday administrative tasks. But it just doesn’t happen. At least the accounts office recently installed keypads at the desk, so that you can enter you SSN silently instead of blurting it out along with your name in front of a room full of strangers. I’ve never been especially paranoid about data, but i believe it pays to be careful, and announcing my social security number to the world is something i prefer to avoid.

7

Wow. I had the same exact problem. I had enough credits my junior year to graduate, but it would have been without a major. The lovely Registrar’s office, noting my apparent senior status, assumed I had graduated and sent on that info to the student loan companies. Note that I was registered for classes that coming fall semester and they also handle all the graduation stuff so you’d think they would check or have noticed and all. (It wasn’t a big school- 4000 students max.)

I found out by getting a notice from Sallie Mae that I would have to start repaying my loans in November. Way to make a student panic.

It took 2 months to get it resolved. Financial Aid had no idea why it had happened and no one thought about the Registrar’s office. Apparently the two didn’t communicate much. Ugh.

8

Wow. As someone who works in higher ed (admin side), I am astounded that 1) everything at your institution seems to be on paper and 2) they are still using SSN’s. Use of SSN’s has been forbidden at every office here with few exceptions (such as resporting of student loan info).

And, speaking as someone in the financial aid sort of area, I have to say that, yes, it is always the Registrar’s fault :smiley:

9

Hell, we’re not even allowed to use student ID numbers (not SSNs, a different, six-digit number) to post grades. We have to create some kind of different random number for every class.

10

I happen to work in the registrar’s office at a university. Does your school have an ombudsman to complain to?

I don’t know how your school works, but the chain of command to follow might be: head of scheduling or records within the registrar’s office > the actual registrar or “director of registration” > provost’s office > university president’s office.

Document everything, stay calm and let 'em have it. They work for the students and are accountable to them. Good luck!