The Irate Spectator

This week Acting President of the University of San Carlos Fr. Felino Javines, SVD released a statement apologizing for the technical problems of the ISIS enrollment system which all but paralyzed enrollment and encoding of grades. As an emergency measure the old ARIS enrollment system is back to accommodate enrollees beginning October 28 and the enrollment period is extended for another week with the start of classes for the Second semester being moved from Nov. 4 to Nov. 10.

In fairness to Fr. Javines, who is also VP for Administration, he couldn't have done much to prevent the breakdown of ISIS having just been appointed to his post at about the time ISIS replaced ARIS which was around June this year. Regardless, the new system already showed its inability to handle the sheer number of enrolling students and was already breaking down even then with a lot of students actually receiving different schedules than the one they had encoded (that included me). Plus, ISIS could only be accessed by 16,000 USC students on a few touchscreens (only two at the Main Campus). Since those problems were already evident then, perhaps the Administration should have been able to do something before the system ultimately crashed.

It's nice to go all hi-tech with the view-my-grades-on-myusc.ph thing but we students didn't really get much out of ISIS other than headaches, long lines and crappy class schedules; and yet we were still the ones who had to foot the bill.