As the school year winds down, UPrep students begin thinking about their classes for the next year, picking 14 classes from 180 unique courses and submitting their request by March 26. This time of year marks the shift from student-led decisions on what courses they want to take to scheduling team-led decisions on what courses they will take.
Stephanie Jewett is the registrar and has worked at UPrep for two years. Jewett builds the forms and prepares the software for course registration. Students fill out their course requests on the online form builder website Jotform and then submit their course requests for review, where the data is then moved to the software Scheduler and individual schedules are created.
“Once that’s done, and once all the course requests are entered into Veracross, key parts of the scheduling team, Assistant Director of Upper School, Meg Anderson-Johnston and math department head Christina Zembruski do the initial scheduling through
the scheduler software,” Jewett said.
After the initial scheduling, Jewett helps place more than 700 students into 642 individual class sections.
“During the summer, I review all the schedules that were composed earlier in the year. I make sure that every student has a complete schedule,” Jewett said. “I make sure that they have prerequisites for
the classes that they’ve signed up to take. If students are on an approved list for, say, Global Link in the spring, they cannot take a Global Online Academy class.”
In addition to creating schedules, Jewett is responsible for helping students add and drop classes.
“I create the forms for the add/drop selections to be submitted. Once they are submitted, I will go through them and see if there’s space available in the class requested,” Jewett said. “The results of the add/drop forms are dropped into a spreadsheet, and then I look through each one.”
The course
registration software has evolved over the last few years after Assistant Head of School for Academics Richard Kassissieh left at the end of the 2022-2023 school year. Kassissieh had created the custom software the UPrep used for course registration
“When that person [Kassissieh] left, no one knew how to operate the custom software and or how to keep it updated,” Jewett said.
Jewett had to create a new system for course registration and aimed to make a better version than before.
“I’ve been trying to make those forms more accommodating, easy to understand for students, so that you can go
ahead and complete it without knowing all the ins and outs that go on behind the scenes,” Jewett said.
Even with the new system in place, students like Senior Wilson Ferguson find some aspects of the old system preferable.
“I would say the current system is fine,” Ferguson said. “The old system was a lot more visual, though. You could see that it was divided by semester.”
Similarly, junior Connor Walsh thinks that there could be minor improvements to the course registration process.
“I don’t mind it that much,” Walsh said. “I think I prefer to have it earlier in the year and have it be reviewed and then given back to us to make changes.”
Looking forward, Jewett continues to work to improve the course registration system.
“I am always on the lookout for ways to improve how student course requests are collected,” Jewett said. “[And] the end is goal is an easy-to-use, intuitive interface.”
