Online system to replace PIN cards for registration

When University of Richmond students register for their spring classes in a few weeks, they will not have term PIN cards for the first time.

The PIN card - an index card printed with a student's name, class year, student ID number and a series of numbers that serve as a password for the student to register - will be replaced with a new online system, the BannerWeb online activation system, Registrar Susan Breeden said.

In the past, students received the PIN cards during meetings with their advisers, Breeden said, and the PIN card system was designed to ensure that students attended their advising meetings. Now, advisers will use a pull-down menu on BannerWeb to check off that they have met with their advisees.

"Basically, it's the same thing without the paperwork," Breeden said.

Breeden said there were a number of reasons for the discontinuation of PIN cards.

"First, there's the green initiative," she said, pointing out that printing PIN cards for each undergraduate student used almost 3,000 index cards each semester.

Eliminating term PIN cards will also save time, Breeden said, because employees in the Registrar's Office usually spend hours sorting PIN cards before each advising period. The cards are sorted by adviser, Breeden said.

Eliminating PIN cards will also benefit students, who have had problems with losing the cards in the past. Without the cards, students were unable to register for classes and sometimes ended up blocked from taking classes they needed because the classes had filled up before the students received new PIN cards.

Additionally, the old system required students to enter their PIN numbers each time they logged in to BannerWeb to register for classes or to make changes later. Often, Breeden said, students would discard their PIN cards after they had completed their initial registration and would run into problems when they tried to make changes.

"We had one case where a student thought it wasn't working, but really had a card from a previous semester," Breeden said. "It can sometimes be really confusing, and we wanted to cut down on that."

There is one more benefit of eliminating the PIN cards, Breeden said: Students that leave them around can risk having their personal information exposed.

"This way, there's no personal information just lying around," Breeden said.

Some students may be nervous about leaving their ability to register in their advisers' hands, Breeden said, but Registrar's Office staff members are doing their best to ensure that everything will go smoothly. Breeden said all advisers would receive a list of their advisees identical to the one that will appear on BannerWeb and will receive a packet of information that will include screenshots of the online system so they can see exactly what to do.

"It's a pretty easy system," Breeden said. "It's designed to make registration easier for everyone."

Contact staff writer Emily Baltz at emily.baltz@richmond.edu