For the Record: Class registration

Today, students annals for classes through the Penn InTouch system, but long earlier this service was available, they had to evidence up in a campus office to choose, alter, or drop a class.

Until 1955, course registration was a several-day process. Students were required to go to ane building to fill out preliminary forms. And then, to register for courses, students needed to go to each of the schools that offered the courses they wanted to take. Finally, they had to go beyond campus to pay the tuition nib. In the fall of 1955, the Registrar's Office created a new organisation unifying the different schools into one central registration organisation.

In this 1965 photo, students are registering for classes in a specially erected registration center in Hutchinson Gym. Long lines extended outside of Hutchinson as thousands of students waited for their plow to annals for the semester.

The chief registrar'south office was located in Logan Hall, but it was not large enough to suit the throng of students during registration.

By the early 1970s, the Role of the Registrar had fabricated huge strides to automate class registration through new technology. Students filled out forms that an optical scanner would read and feed into a figurer's memory bank. The process allowed professors to know who and how many students were signed upwardly for a course. The system also speedily
gave students up-to-date information on what was available when they dropped or added a course.

In 2008, the University implemented the online registration system Penn InTouch, which allowed students to pick courses based on several criteria.

The mobile version of Penn InTouch was launched in 2011.

For more data about this and other historical events at Penn, visit the University Archives online.

Class Registration