Why CAESAR still sucks and how to fix it
The CAESAR course selection system at Northwestern is a piece of crap. Sure, it had an upgrade about a year ago. We now have shopping carts and stuff. Sounds fantastic. At any rate, here’s my list of CAESAR add-ons that would make my life so much easier.
1. Stop having the search function default to the previous quarter. Oh, this pisses me off so much. I’m trying to register for my Winter 2009 classes, but CAESAR likes to default to Fall 2008 classes. I’m sure this has happened to numerous people: You’re sitting and looking through classes and you find an amazing class on Lumberjacking Techniques. “OMG,” you say, “let me add that to my shopping cart.” But you can’t because that class already happened. Would whoever controls CAESAR just update the damn thing in a timely fashion?!
2. Get a recommendation system. “Based on your CTEC reviews of Lumberjacking Techniques, you also might enjoy The Fine Art of the Blacksmith.” It would be just like iTunes, Netflix or Amazon’s systems. CTECs would still remain anonymous. The data would just be anonymously harvested for this process. Yes, I know it would take some time to code this, but it would be eternally useful. I don’t have time to search through every department. Give me some recommendations. Better yet, get the Computer Science majors to code this as a project. They’d love it and it would save NU some green.
3. Nix the shopping cart, add a wish list. The shopping cart sucks. Once you add stuff to the shopping cart, you have to enroll in those classes. Yes, you can hit the little trash can icon, but if I ever want that class back, I have to search for it again. If I had a wish list on CAESAR, I could add every class that I’m thinking about taking (usually 7 or so each quarter) and simply check the ones I want to enroll in when my time comes. Sometimes, I want to drop a class and add one of my other choices. If I had a wish list, this would be simple. Ultimately, this could be easily fixed by just adding check boxes to the shopping cart in addition to the trash can.
4. Let Quikpay communicate with CAESAR. There are times when I get behind in my quarterly payments and Northwestern puts a registration hold on my account. Understandable. But once I pay the balance due, the hold is supposed to be lifted. However, in order to have the hold lifted, I have to call some office at Northwestern and speak to someone. Why? Why can’t these two systems talk to each other? And if I pay my balance on the weekend, why do I have to wait until Monday to get my hold released? Absolutely ridiculous.
Have any more ideas? Let us know in the comments.
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Yeah, Caesar isn’t the greatest system, but you also need to know how to use it.
“Once you add stuff to the shopping cart, you have to enroll in those classes.” That’s just not true. You’re accessing it from the “Add” section, if you access it from the enrollment shopping chart there are check boxes to easily delete/enroll in classes. It’s IS a wish list.
“And if I pay my balance on the weekend, why do I have to wait until Monday to get my hold released? Absolutely ridiculous.” First of all, you’re probably not registering on the weekend you pay your balance–you’d do that before you’d register ideally. Secondly, payments need to be processed–as hard as it is to imagine, not everything is automated, and waiting until the next business isn’t ridiculous.
MM
November 16, 2008 at 11:44 pm
mm,
your comment proves how hard caesar is. two shpping carts? who designed that?
if you have a hold on your account the week you register and you don’t pay it until friday night, you cant register until monday. while this hasnt happened to me, i see the point. also, payments are instant. i can call the student account office to get the hold removed as soon as i pay it.
NN
November 16, 2008 at 11:56 pm
I completely agree about the first point. I HATE how it always defaults wrong
Graham Banner
November 17, 2008 at 12:13 am
You can change the quarter it defaults to under Personal Portfolio->User Preferences.
It would be nice if CAESAR did it for you, but you can still do it yourself if it’s such a big deal…
JC
November 17, 2008 at 2:14 am
Bigger problem for me is how it reloads the ENTIRE page anytime you change one drop-down menu item while searching for courses. Ah, I accidentally clicked “Psychology?” REFRESHING. Oh no, pushed “Philosophy” now. REFRESHING.
Oh, and the fact that it sends you to the top of a page once it finishes loading (i.e. as it populates all the classes that fall under your search criteria) is also irritating. The terrible coding of CAESAR would be acceptable if we were in 1996… but we’re not and I assume the university spent good money for this travesty of a system.
Dima
November 17, 2008 at 3:16 am
Alright, guess what this is exactly what the Academic Committee of ASG has been working on since midway through 1st quarter. (See we do accomplish things!) Share your ideas and we will be sure to implement them best we can. Currently, we’re trying to group classes in CTEC rankings, so although we hadn’t thought of a recommendation system, you could go to a department and observe the highest rated classes
Help us help you!
Michael Mcgee
November 17, 2008 at 4:34 am
I must admit I was fuming over that first one a couple days ago, but I think this article (and others like it) says something unique about our generation.
We’re so used to seeing technology change at a rapid rate that we’ve trained ourselves to quickly forget past “the way things were”. For example, a few years ago we would never have demanded that our registration website suggest classes we might enjoy based on our CTECs, because this would seem like a monumental and nearly impossible project. Now, thanks to websites like the ones this author mentioned, we almost expect these practices to be implemented. It’s likely that the call for a “shopping cart” arose from similar demands from the student body, rather than an inside the administration.
I don’t doubt that our generation’s heightened exposure to new web technology will lead to new expectations and changes in NU’s administration websites.
Vince
November 17, 2008 at 8:05 am
It would also be nice if CAESAR’s error messages were helpful, rather than harmfully confusing. The “Requirements not met” message when someone tries to preregister for a class that doesn’t allow preregistration makes students go back and look at whether they’ve taking the prerequisites rather than simply saying something like, “This class doesn’t allow preregistration.”
Mark Witte
November 17, 2008 at 8:18 am
The picture is the best ever. I laughed out loud.
Emily
November 17, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Recommendation systems are pretty beastly pieces of software. They require lots of computation, memory, and are very unreliable unless you have massive amounts of data. Even if it were seamlessly implemented and integrated (ha! ha!), adding such a system would make CAESAR even more sluggish than it already is while adding little to no value. It’s definitely not on my project radar.
A CS Major
November 17, 2008 at 7:28 pm
I’d just like to say that people’s comments on article have been immensely helpful! Now I know how to get around some of CAESAR’s kinks.
The thing about CAESAR that annoys ME most, however, is that you can’t access class descriptions from the shopping cart. If you click on the link with the class dept and number (which helps no one in remembering what the class is), all you get is the title of the class and the prerequisites. I would love to be able to read the description again without having to go all the way back to “search classes”, etc…
Alyssa
November 17, 2008 at 10:23 pm
wait… did they actually take your recommendations? look at caesar, you don’t have to enroll in everything in your cart now.
Josh
November 18, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Allowing tabbed browsing would be nice. I’d like to be able to look at multiple things at the same time.
Sara
February 3, 2009 at 10:51 am