At Wilfrid Laurier University, we’re lucky to have an amazing school and city to live in. We have a top-ranked athletics program with teams continuously competing for championships, we have clubs for just about any interest out there and we have great nightlife from trivia at Wilf’s to letting loose at Phil’s. Like all great things, there are downfalls ours being LORIS, where there is unreliability, a lot unnecessary time consumption and extremely slow speeds.
In my first-year course registration, I was lucky to have an upper-year student sign me up for courses and in second-year I was one of the lucky ones to get through right away. But my first real LORIS experience came in course registration for third-year.
Finally after two hours of preparation time, came the dreaded LORIS log-on, the moment almost every Laurier student hates. Even if it is 10 seconds before the opening time or right on the dot, you’re more than likely going to be sitting on the blank screen hoping this time the page will load or if you’re one of the lucky ones and it loads right away.
One of the biggest issues with LORIS is that it is extremely unreliable. Not only do you need to have your courses selected, but also you even need a backup list. Why? Because you’re more than likely to sit until 2 a.m., aimlessly refreshing hoping to get in this time, but at this point, all of the courses you’ve wanted are gone.
On top of the extreme unreliability, it is beyond slow. In most cases students are half asleep watching Netflix to stay awake on the night of course registration. But not only are we forced to sign up so late, we’re more than likely to be mindlessly hitting the refresh button.
If your experience was anything like mine this year, I was sitting on “this page is unavailable” until 1:45 a.m. I did get a good binge watching session of Prison Break in, so I guess you could say the night was somewhat productive. But I definitely didn’t get into the courses I wanted to right off the bat.
Although we must give the Laurier information technology team and LORIS some credit. The initial day where it was registration by credit count, I was in and out of LORIS within two minutes with all the courses I needed.
We’ve seen some improvement with the registration system in the past two years, but there is definitely a lot of room for improvement here as we all saw with the registration for each faculty going by number of credits. With this new improvement I was in and out of LORIS within a matter of minutes. If only every time I needed LORIS it was like that.
If that system could be incorporated when the electives are chosen, I can’t see many people complaining about LORIS anymore; but until then, here’s to another year of hoping LORIS will get better.