UIUC Class Registration, Part I

It’s that time of year. Class registration for Spring 2008 classes is in full swing at the University of Illinois.

Class registration is done through “UI-Integrate Self-Service.” It is also called “Banner” or “Enterprise” by some. All these names refer to the same online system, located at https://ui-integrate.apps.uillinois.edu. You can get to this website many ways, and most people have their own unique way of getting there (the link on the Course Catalog site, for example).

The time at which you are allowed to register is called your time ticket. Your time ticket is determined by your class as well as if you are in select groups (James Scholars, marching band members, and varsity athletes get to register before everyone else). To see your exact time ticket, log in to UI-Integrate Self-Service, but to see the generalized groups, there is a list on the Office of Records website.

Choosing your classes is normally easy. All majors have a flow chart of classes that are suggested each semester. This chart can be found at the bottom of the description of your major on the UIUC Course Catalog. If you need to choose some GenEd courses, you can follow the links on the Course Catalog and choose a class that is interesting.

Getting your classes into a schedule that you approve of can be more difficult. There are a few online services that allow you to choose your classes easily. The service I like the most is IlliNexus Schedule Planner. Using this tool, you can input your classes, and then turn classes on and off to easily see when the classes fall each week. After you choose your perfect schedule in IlliNexus, you can sign up for those classes with the click on a button at the bottom of the screen. Beware – some of the classes could be filled, and when you sign up for all the classes in your perfect schedule, they will all be added except for one or two of the classes that are full. This really ruins your schedule, so if you’re signing up for a class that could potentially be full, you should check the status of the capacity by logging into UI-Integrate and looking up the course. This will show you how many spaces are taken and remaining in each class.

Another online class schedule service is Scheedule. Scheedule is developed by the UIUC chapter of ACM, and is very good. Scheedule gives you all the different options of class combinations by scrolling through them. You can also specify your class preferences, like your favorite times of day, or clustered/spread out classes. Scheedule is also a very good scheduling tool.

So that is basically the process. If you like a lot of control over your schedule, I’d recommend IlliNexus Schedule Planner; but if you are lazy and just want a schedule that works, Scheedule will give you the best option without much thinking required by you.

Do you have other ways of scheduling your classes? Let us know in the comments. Happy Scheduling!