It’s April; class registration arrives, and plans for a new semester approach. You stare at the clock awaiting your designated registration time — only to miss out on classes you were looking forward to taking, despite beating the deadline! To avoid the anxiety and chaos of class registration, the University is instituting a new and improved course scheduling system to be set in motion for the Fall 2021 semester. 

Intended to take some of the stress off student registration, this new Plan Ahead feature allows students to build up to five tentative schedules so that they are prepared with alternate options in the case that course sections fill up during their registration time. When it’s time to register, students can add their planned schedules all at once with just one submission. Once the schedule is submitted, the system will check to ensure the courses are available and the student meets any prerequisites or other course restrictions. If unable to add all the courses in their first plan, students can resubmit a second plan until they reach the desired amount of courses. Both the Plan Ahead and Registration screens will display the classes in a calendar view, giving students a visual display of potential schedule conflicts. 

“I would imagine students with multiple labs or recitations will find this particularly useful. In the past students have used third-party websites to build their schedules. Since these sites are not affiliated with Bucknell, they often had outdated course information and this led to confusion for students. Our tools use real time data so students are always seeing the most accurate information,” Associate Registrar Melissa Weber said.

Students will access this new feature through MyBucknell under Web Tools for Students. From this page, students can access the registration times, their academic progress report, the overload and underload request form, the waitlist form, and other useful links. “We hope that having links to all the registration-related information in one place will make things easier for students,” Weber said.

Along with Plan Ahead, the University is offering another new registration feature: Conditional Add Drop. Weber explains that “when the Conditional Add Drop box is checked, a course that is marked drop/delete will be removed only if the newly entered course is successfully registered. If the new course does not work, then the original course will remain registered. This allows students to try other courses without losing their spot in the original course they have signed up for.”