Stumbling Out of the Gate: Dartmouth’s Add/Drop Fiasco

Last Sunday night, the global experiment that is Dartmouth Online began inauspiciously with the spectacular collapse of the Add/Drop system. The Add/Drop system exists to allow students to change their classes on the first day of term. The system processes requests in a purely sequential fashion, so hundreds of students all try to submit their course changes as soon as the system opens. Due to the move to online classes and the cancellation of all study abroad programs because of the coronavirus outbreak, more students than usual were awaiting the opening of Add/Drop last Monday. 

This add/drop was especially high-skates for the students who had planned on participating in one of the now-canceled study abroad programs, as they did not merely need to switch into one class, but to register for a full three-course load. As the first real test of Dartmouth’s fully-online term, the pressure was on the College to facilitate a smooth transition into a virtual learning environment. Instead, the full-scale failure of the Add/Drop system laid bare their administrative and IT incompetence while inciting panic amongst students in the process.

On Saturday, March 28, the Registrar notified students that Add/Drop would begin at 12:00 a.m. on Monday, March 31. This message was slightly odd, given that, for the last two terms, the Add/Drop period had begun at 8:00 a.m. on the first day of classes. This 8:00 a.m. start time was, itself, a departure from prior years when Add/Drop always occurred the midnight before classes. The change made this fall was intended to mitigate the chaos and confusion that inevitably occurred when hordes of students stayed up until the witching hour only to have the Add/Drop server crash, all the while being unable to reach IT personnel. One would assume that, anticipating a larger than ever volume of traffic through their website, the College would have stood by their choice to shy away from this midnight mayhem, but alas this was not the case. 

To no one’s surprise, the problems began promptly at 12:00 a.m. EST when the Add/Drop system crashed so quickly that it appeared to have never been open at all.

To no one’s surprise, the problems began promptly at 12:00 a.m. EST when the Add/Drop system crashed so quickly that it appeared to have never been open at all. No one could change their classes at the expected time, but as addressed, this inconvenience was expected. The students, if not the Administration, knew for a fact that the system would overload and crash. Nevertheless, students immediately took to GroupMe to complain about the situation, all the while refreshing their Darthub webpages in anticipation that the server would come back online soon. The students continued to wait while poking fun at a frustrating, but familiar set of circumstances. 

However, once an hour had passed, moods began to sour. Some enterprising undergraduates realized that they could phone the Dean’s Office and talk to the Dean-On-Call. The Dean told them that the Registrar’s email from Saturday had mistakenly included the old Add/Drop time and that Add/Drop would open at 8:00 a.m., as it had for the past two terms. By 2:00 a.m. EST, this information from the Dean-On-Call was already swirling through GroupMes of increasingly weary students. The students, annoyed but ultimately pacified by this extremely plausible explanation from a College official, went to bed, after setting alarms for the 8:00 a.m. opening of Add/Drop. To most, this appeared to be the best course of action, especially given that the College had sent absolutely no guidance or even acknowledgment of this massive failure, despite the fact that thousands of students across the globe had been waiting for hours. 

As it turned out, the Dean’s information was wrong. Add/Drop opened with absolutely no warning at approximately 5:30 a.m. EST, giving students who happened to be online at that exact moment a huge advantage in course selection. Courses with caps were filled almost instantaneously, so any student who was sleeping or waiting for the 8:00 a.m. opening time was left scrambling to get into any course they still could.  

On a sobering note, the College’s complete incompetence and misguided priorities in handling the issue of course registration, an issue that every student anticipated but no administrator responded effectively to, should cause the scales to come crashing from our eyes.

While to some (including many members of this staff) this complete fiasco was a fitting and amusing start to what is certain to be an academically disastrous term. However, on a sobering note, the College’s complete incompetence and misguided priorities in handling the issue of course registration, an issue that every student anticipated but no administrator responded effectively to, should cause the scales to come crashing from our eyes. Clearly the College is either unable or unwilling to solve the problems that most affect students. Those who claim that the College is unable to solve these problems would no doubt focus on the complete technological collapse underlying this whole mess. Those who claim that they are unwilling to solve these problems would highlight that the College did not make exemptions for students on canceled study abroad trips or those with learning disabilities to register for classes early, despite making early registration available for students in various “identity” based groups. 

We do not believe that the administration is deliberately steering us in the wrong direction, we simply believe that they are asleep at the wheel, or as the case might have it, the reins.  

Nevertheless, the most alarming reason for this full-scale failure is no doubt the most plausible. The College had no plan for how to handle this problem because they had no idea that it was coming. The problem was not shocking, but their naiveté is. In fact, it is inexcusable—just as inexcusable as the fact that the Registrar’s office did not coordinate with the Dean’s office to prevent the spread of misinformation and just as an inexcusable as the fact that, to date, the College has issued no statement apologizing for or even acknowledging their blunder. Again, The Review does not ascribe malice to the College’s intentions in this matter, merely incompetence. We do not believe that the administration is deliberately steering us in the wrong direction, we simply believe that they are asleep at the wheel, or as the case might have it, the reins.  

Continue reading The Review’s satirical coverage of this event:
https://dartreview.com/amid-coronavirus-lockdown-issues-with-add-drop/