At the conclusion of pre-registration at 4 p.m. Monday, approximately 3,175 of 3,300 students had completed registration online via the OnTrack system.

"It went much better than it did in the fall," said Mark Albertson, registrar and assistant to the provost. The registrar’s office received no phone calls regarding difficulties accessing the OnTrack system or submitting special requests for certain courses, and the Elon system did not overload as it did in the fall, according to Albertson.

However, at 6 a.m. on the first day of registration, students were already contacting the registrar’s office regarding a class that closed before registration officially began.

"The registrar’s office took some heat because there was one section of one part of senior communications class that closed early although there were four additional sections of that class," Albertson said. "An adjustment was made once The Pendulum addressed that."

The OnTrack clock was fast by as much as eight minutes, allowing students to register for classes before their group’s registration was supposed to begin.

"Its hard to say whose clock is right, so a coworker said, ‘Well why don’t we look out there and find the official U.S. clock,’" said Doug McIntyre, project manager for information systems. McIntyre placed a link to the official time on the OnTrack registration Web page, so students in each group would know exactly when they could begin registration.

This semester, the registrar’s office created more groups with smaller numbers of students to accommodate the regular Internet traffic of the university in addition to the added registration traffic.

"The OnTrack system would be able to accommodate more students at a given time more efficiently if the university purchased additional processors," Albertson said.

"When students registered on paper, you had one big vertical line. Now with OnTrack, you have one horizontal line with everybody holding their forms out. We have to determine how many the system can receive at one time," McIntyre said.

Registration groups are determined by credit hours with special groups for Honors students and Teaching Fellows.

"Historically, students who are in Honors and Teaching Fellows register before the other students in their group," Albertson said. There is always pressure from other fellows programs to register early.