CORS

Oh yea, the brain child of NUS, the centre of how students get their courses (otherwise known as modules in uni-language-speak) and timings from.

And this blardy system which is central to everything, is unable to handle the sudden influx of students logging in early in the morning (at 9am, which is not REALLY early) to make their ballots.

The server simply went kaput on the dot of 9am, with all the requests bouncing in.

And this carried on for the rest of the day, with people logging in from various parts of the campus and from home.

To the user, it is simply an oversight of the server administrators to ensure that the server is able to cope with the influx of user-side requests. More could be done to ensure that the server would not be bogged down during such a time where time is precious and students have to ballot for the tutorials which they really want.

With NUS being seen as a world-class institute such a failure is indeed interesting. In fact, walk around school today and the common topic amongst students would be regarding the CORS system. Students are interested in pursuing their studies, not to be held back by some defect caused on the side of the school's administration, else they would not pay the exhobirant school fees for a university degree.

A university degree is a total package for the student, acadmically and administrative-wise. What students would expect of a world-class university is one which will think ahead and have the basic foresight to anticipate problems, and thus tweak or even change the system to ensure the 'doomsday scenario' would not occur.

Yet, it seems that NUS has not done much in upgrading the CORS system, which has been in use for the past 2 years at least. Moreover, signs had shown that the CORS system is unable to take the full brunt of students logging in at peak hours to bid or ballot for their important modules. This was shown a week ago, when Week 1 started, and Round 2A of Module Bidding occurred. An extension period was activated as the server became laggy and could not process the huge influx of information by the numerous computers accessing its servers. This shows that the servers might have a problem coping, and it is a temporary relief that during Round 2A, not all students would need to bid, as many would only require to bid for their core modules in Round 1.

Thus far, a petition is going on here to speak out against the CORS system, which I feel, should be improved and tweaked, lest such an event happens again.

I hope such an incident does not happen again. Seriously speaking, it's a total WASTE OF TIME.

I hereby decree it as:
Central
Orgasmic
Really waste time
System

Current Mood: Grumpy