Notre Dame will continue using the DART registration system over NOVO for the upcoming class registration period, the Office of the Registrar announced in an email to students Monday.
DART and NOVO have been the University’s class registration systems for over two years. In 2015, the Office of the Registrar announced NOVO would be replacing DART as the primary system for class registration. Following a NOVO system malfunction during class registration in fall 2017, however, the registrar reverted back to utilizing DART last spring.
“The DART registration performs better at higher volumes than NOVO does,” Chuck Hurley, the University registrar, said. “So just like last April, we’ll have DART on in class search during the six business days of peak registration there, and then NOVO will be off during those days.”
“Peak registration” period will take place Nov. 12-19, when all students taking courses at Notre Dame next semester will register for classes according to class level. Seniors register Nov. 12, juniors on Nov. 14, sophomores on Nov. 16 and freshmen the following Monday, Nov. 19.
Registration time tickets will remain the same as last semester as well, Hurley said, with the first registration wave at 6:30 a.m. each day and the last at 8:20 a.m., with 10-minute intervals in-between.
“Right now we’re pretty standard with the registration practices that the University has been utilizing for the last several years,” Hurley said. “We receive a lot of input on that from the advising deans of the University, and they like the system that we have at this point where we have advising going on for a couple of weeks and then the registration taking place over about a week and a half.”
In Nov. 2017, the Office of the Registrar tested a new class registration planning tool called “ND Academic Planner.” Created collaboratively with student government, the feature allowed students to add entire schedule plans to their official schedules on registration days with two clicks.
Though the tool was scheduled to be implemented this fall, Hurley said ND Academic Planner will not be implemented yet because it uses NOVO, which will be turned off during peak registration period.
“[The Academic Planner is] a very good tool, but the vendor has to fix the challenges with NOVO first before we could implement the Academic Planner,” he said. “The Academic Planner is something we built here at Notre Dame in-house, but it requires NOVO to function at higher load levels than it is currently.”
Though DART hasn’t brought up any problems, the plan is to eventually transition into using NOVO again, Hurley said. However, that goal is on hold until the vendor for NOVO, Ellucian, provides a fix to the system’s low tolerance for “higher loads.”
“The schedule display within NOVO is very nice; you can see a grid schedule across the week kind of like a Google Calendar,” Hurley said. “So the look and feel of it is a little bit better but … the functionality doesn’t operate as well at higher loads.”
Coursicle is a third-party vendor providing an additional academic planning tool for Notre Dame students. Even so, Hurley said Coursicle has “nothing to do with” Notre Dame contract-wise and can be a source of potential registration problems.
“If students want to utilize that information, then they can, but it’s not up-to-date information, either,” Hurley said. “We often see a delay — a student will say, ‘Well it looks to me like Coursicle says this about a class.’ Well, it had been changed days before that in our system, and so Coursicle just doesn’t update theirs as much as ours.”
Most challenges arise from lack of preparation, Hurley said. He advised students to check their desired classes beforehand for prerequisites and co-requisites and to be on the “eduroam” WiFi network if registering on campus.
Should any problems with class registration arise, the Office of the Registrar can be contacted at registrar.1@nd.edu or 574-631-7043.
“The more prep work that students do beforehand — checking prerequisites, co-requisites, recording the CRNs that they want to register for — the better off they are once they get to the registration time,” Hurley said.
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