Since launching a new upgrade of the school’s administrative program, Datatel, in October, several scheduling and grading mix-ups have occurred. The most notable errors were a mistake in the online grades that were posted Dec. 20 and the scheduling of the History and Sociology of Rock ‘n’ Roll class.
“We went to a brand new version of the software, and this is the first time we’ve done grades and registration with the new software,” said Director of Administrative Technology Michael Quiner. “We messed up.”
The upgraded version of Datatel was a general update that needed to be tailored to fit Whitman’s needs.
“Whitman has very unique policy requirements and those put excessive demand on the software and the staff that has to adjust the software to fit Whitman’s picture,” said Registrar Ron Urban.
In the scramble to adjust the software, a computing error was made which caused all A’s to show up as A+’s on the online reports. This mix-up affected 1,100 individual grades; however, it had no effect on either semester or cumulative GPAs.
“It was honorific capital that was being spent; it had nothing to do substantively with the numerical value,” said Urban.
Even though GPAs were not affected, a minority of students still requested that their A+’s be restored. Their requests were not accommodated.
Most students understood the mistake. “I thought it was a little weird, but it was fine,” said first-year Diane Feuillet. “An A was still fine with me for my first semester at college. It wasn’t a huge deal, a little disappointing at first, but I didn’t mind too much.”
The mistake was fixed within the next day.
“It was embarrassing, but they caught it within a day and I suspect that some students didn’t even notice a difference,” said Urban. “Justice was served in the end.”
Independent of the Datatel upgrade was a scheduling blunder surrounding the History and Sociology of Rock ‘n’ Roll class. The class, which is typically group-taught on a two-year rotation by Professors Keith Farrington and Dave Schmitz, was accidentally scheduled as two separate classes, one in the sociology department and the other in the history department. Last year, Schmitz was on sabbatical and the course was taught solely by Farrington.
“Last year only one professor taught the class and we didn’t catch the transition from one to two, so we left it as two separate sections,” said Urban.
Unfortunately, the slip was not recognized until after pre-registration was complete.
“We should have proofread our schedule of classes more closely and that’s what we are going to do from now on: have two sets of eyes look at it,” said Urban.
Schmitz and Farrington were then faced with a decision of whether to un-enroll 50 students or teach the classes separately.
“Both Dave Schmitz and I are pretty student oriented, and know it’s a small school and that if students want to take classes you try and do what you can to let them into the classes,” Farrington said. “We winded up having two separate sections of the class.”
With each professor teaching a section of 50 students, they were able to accommodate all hundred students who were originally registered, as well as accommodating many students on the wait list.
“We’ll have to see how it turns out, but we think this is pretty workable and manageable,” Schmitz said. “It was just an honest mistake and what we didn’t want was to punish the students.”
Given the change, each class plan was slightly altered to reflect the specialty of the professor teaching it. “The sections will have somewhat different emphasis,” said Schmitz. “But we tried to minimize that by swapping sections about seven or eight times a semester.”
Although both the grading and scheduling mix-ups have been fixed, Urban assures us that when dealing with a complex computer system, future errors are inevitable.
“These will probably never happen again, but I can guarantee you that we will make other mistakes,” said Urban.
