Admissions Portal: Breakthrough or Failure
The King Saud University KSU made a new portal dedicated for drop-and-add courses, inter-college transference, and serve other things students se to do. The portal is helpful for shortening time students consume when adding; dropping; transferring from a college to another. However, problems still on and some students like the portal, while other still complain.
Student Khalid Alfarhan, who wants to transfer from college of tourism and archeology to that of administrative sciences, proposes to make such process from one place; the admissions deanship.
Student Ashgehan al-Gahanty lauded the new online service saying that it helped shorten time consumed and encouraged students not to come to campus. Different to the past, the figure of students coming goes down to 5% against the figure recorded for past years. Employees had to stay to midnight to finish up students requests, but now they no more do.
Complaining against the uselessness of the portal, student Fawaz Al-Shamary, said he went thru difficulty of having his courses not registered online. However, it is better than the past mechanism but needed customized solutions.
Interviewing Dr. Abdul-Aziz Al-Osman, vice-dean of Admissions deanship, to inquire about the portal. The portal is experimental and under development. This helps college give feedbacks to develop the portal.
The problem lies in colleges; they change the academic plans continuously. The figure of students who have not registered is 4% of the total number of male students, 2% of female students.
On clearance forms for students leaving campus, he said everything is done electronically with no need to go on campus. If everything is OK for a student, he gets the clearance form online.
Yet, we should bear in mind that every system has simple things that could be corrected and upgraded.
He blamed that some colleges have not made data migration yet for a more advanced version of the system. However, it is a breakthrough in services offered to students.