Approximately 1,800 students were accidentally auto-enrolled across 1,100 different classes for the Fall 2018 semester, from the waitlist, due to a manual waitlist engine run performed by the District IT department Sept. 11.
The engine run was performed due to a request placed by an LACCD employee for assistance on a waitlist inquiry and to support the college. When the parameters were input into the system, they were incorrect, causing the waitlist engine run to be performed district-wide. The technical team is in the process of dropping the students that were accidently auto-enrolled in the system.
“The team is taking extra precaution to guarantee that the student’s academic record does not reflect a ‘W’ for the drop nor that any institutional charges for the extra class is calculated,” Betsy Regalado said in her email addressing the matter. “Regarding financial aid, there should be no impact to the students affected by the waitlist error since the repackaging run was not scheduled to execute until this evening.”
She noted that initially no official notification of the auto-enrollment from the waitlist was sent to students, however students became aware of the auto-enrollment through their self-service portal. Regalado explained in the email to faculty that they planned to send out an email to students impacted that they should receive an email concerning the auto-enrollment within 24 hours.
Athletic counselor Joseph Roberson expressed how we was impressed by the way that the administration handled the matter.
“I think the positive that we can take out of this, is the administration’s willingness to acknowledge their mistake, take responsibility and their will to correct it in a timely manner,” said Roberson.
Regalado hopes as the college and district staff continue to learn the integrities of our new student information system (PeopleSoft Campus Solutions), the staff will become more familiar with the system, making a smaller margin for error.
“This incident made me realize that we need to develop a policy and schedule on when to purge the waitlist,” said Regalado. “The date should be sometime after the last day to add classes for each unique session to prevent something like this from happening again.”
She assured that no student that was accidently auto-enrolled from the waitlist on September 11 will receive a “W” on their transcript and they are retaining an Excel file of all the students affected by the waitlist auto-enrollment issue. That way, if a discrepancy does occur, for example, they do receive a “W,” not only will the system record the add date of the invalid auto-enrolled class but we will have a hard copy of the transactions performed.
When asked about the current status of the students enrolled, Donna Villanueva explained that they do not have anymore updates at the moment.
“We are still waiting to hear, I don’t have any updates right now” said Villanueva.
If students are still experiencing problems with auto-enrollment or adding classes, they should contact a counselor to get further assistance.
