Naked City

One Hell of a Deal

Hundreds of Austin Community College students received a fine how-do-you-do on their first day of fall classes: Some discovered that their names had been dropped from class rolls, others that the GPAs on their grade reports had changed. The errors came courtesy of a new, bug-ridden $2.5 million automated record-keeping system ACC purchased from Datatel, a computer software company. After spending several days working late to straighten out all the student complaints, ACC faculty and administrators have their own name for the software: Data Hell.

"Assistant deans ... were pulling their hair out. The first week of the semester was just a zoo," reports adjunct professor David Lauderback, who says one of his students was shocked to find her reported GPA had fallen from 4.0 to 2.5. ACC administrators have since corrected that error, and have posted the reassuring news that student records are still intact in the old record-keeping system. But that hasn't appeased faculty members who had to deal with angry students who were unknowingly booted from courses which later filled up. Professor Marlette Rebhorn says she "cut deals" with students by promising them spots in later courses to prevent an insurrection. "It's the faculty on the front line that have had to pick up the pieces," says Rebhorn. "What we're doing is making up for a system that is deeply flawed."

Assistant dean Jerry Shepperd, who had students lined up outside his office door for several days straight, says that while converting to Datatel wasn't "the end of the world ... it was busy, at times crazy. ...The brunt of the burden has been borne by faculty."

The conversion of student records and admissions onto Datatel software is the final step in a technology overhaul ACC began early last year to fully integrate the college under one record-keeping system. But the Datatel system was not well-designed for a college as large and diverse as ACC. The software will not, for example, process student payment plans, send or receive electronic transcripts, or allow two users to pull up a student's record simultaneously. Many students' GPAs were altered by the system because it failed to recognize courses students had taken at other universities and simply deleted them from the students' transcripts. The system was also ill-designed to handle add/drop requests through telephone registration, knocking students out of classes they tried to add during registration if they failed to add a class in the same phone call in which they dropped another.

ACC President Richard Fonte originally hoped to bring admissions record keeping into the Datatel system by spring of last year. But Vice President of Student Services Maggie Culp, who had been hired only a few months before to oversee the Student Services revamp, warned Fonte that trying to convert that quickly would cause "the biggest unmitigated disaster in the history of the college." Culp recommended converting in spring 2000, but the ACC administration, worried that overhauling the system in a base funding year would negatively affect enrollment, and that the old system was not Y2K compliant, ordered that the Datatel system be fired up for fall 1999 enrollment. However, ACC hired no additional staff to aid in the conversion.

Some faculty say that Fonte should have known better than to purchase a system poorly equipped for ACC's needs, and grumble that the technology upgrade represents little more than a résumé-booster for Fonte. But ACC administrators respond that the old system was "held together with baling wire" and that the Datatel integrated system was the best one available.

"This system is no better and no worse than any other. ... You've got to make it work for you. It won't work right out of the can for an institution of this size," says Culp. The college committed some errors of its own, admits Associate VP of Information Technology Bill Carter -- failing, for example, to print the new Datatel course numbers in the fall class schedules. Professors were unable to tell which sections of their courses students belonged in until new rosters were distributed to faculty.

All in all, say ACC officials, the present struggles will be worthwhile. The new system, they say, keeps ACC up to speed with other community colleges across Texas and offers better student service. It will allow faculty to enter grades by computer, offer transcripts and graduation checks online, and automatically check students' prerequisites before they enroll in advanced courses. What the system also does, of course, is give ACC much better information about its students, including where they transfer to and what courses they prefer.

ACC administrators say they've worked long and hard to de-bug the Datatel software and feel that the problems are under control. But Datatel has yet to respond to some deep-seated glitches, they say, prompting ACC to join with other community colleges in forming a Datatel users' group to force better client service from the company. Culp says she and her technology steering committee have compiled eight pages of items that ACC will demand Datatel fix over the coming year.