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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

Show Me the Rooms!


I’ve had a lot of calls regarding the absence of room assignments on the summer and fall 2006 master schedules. I tried at first to make people think they were hallucinating and that they just couldn’t see the rooms. Apparently everyone has already read “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and is not as gullible as I had hoped. All right. I admit it. There are very few room assignments listed for summer and fall 2006.

What you may not realize is that when the room assignments have appeared this early in the past, they were ‘fake’ room assignments! Any rooms listed when the master schedules went to press and at the beginning of registration were merely the rooms the courses had been in the previous year. They sit out there as place holders until I change them all around. Occasionally a course might stay in the room into which it rolled but the majority of them are changed several times before the start of the semester.

Commencing (I like to get that college jargon in!) with Banner we have not rolled any master schedule information. The master schedules for both summer and fall 2006 were totally rebuilt one course at a time and all the room assignments will be handled the same way. No courses rolled and thus no room assignments rolled.

People who in the past chose which sections they would teach based on the room assignment at the start of registration were living in a dream world. Summer rooms will be finalized by mid-May; fall rooms by mid-August. Until then the rooms keep getting changed and juggled as courses reach max enrollment or fall far short. The room assignment process is incredibly fluid, changing to meet different demands as needed.

Is there anything you can do to try to get your ideal room? Of course! I’ll address that concern in future Trib articles. Right now I’m just trying to figure out HOW to do room assignments in Banner. The buildings and rooms seem to be buried about six layers (NEXT BLOCK) deep in SSASECT. Gotta get the spelunking gear.

Deborah Benjamin
Registration and Records
02/16/2006