Anxious freshmen waited for the NGS (No Grade Submitted) to turn into numbers on their My.LaSalle (MLS) accounts as the 8pm deadline for the teachers to submit the grades neared.
The other undergraduates, however, were indifferent to the excitement of the younger batch. They know from experience that the MLS system would be flooded and would eventually crash, similar to what happened in all three terms last year.
The system crash results from the number of faculty saving the grades on MLS, combined with the number of impatient students trying to access their grades, according to Information Technology Systems Director Allan Surla. The system cannot process all the information simultaneously.
The University Student Government (USG) together with the Information Technology Center (ITC) created an online grade viewing schedule during the start of this academic year. According to USG President Lorenz de Castro, the schedule will prevent the usual problem of system crash during the grade viewing.
It was only a year ago when the University Enrollment Council replaced the course card distribution day to two separate days of online grade viewing and grade consultation.
The online grade viewing last Sept. 7 did improve compared with the previous terms. Aside from some isolated cases of blank white pages asking to redirect the connection to the MLS account, the system did not encounter any major glitch that would delay the online viewing of grades. Students, generally, didn’t have a hard time logging on to their MLS accounts to view their grades.
“The grade viewing this year was better than last year’s. I had no problem accessing my MLS account,” Kim Calantoc (II, PSM-APC) attests.
The new implemented schedule was not the reason behind the improvement of the grade viewing. Surla explains that a 30-minute downtime was implemented after the 8pm deadline. The downtime allowed ITC to reset the system for maximum capacity. It helped filter the simultaneous access of the faculty and the students
If the schedule was followed, the freshmen and graduate students could view their grades at 8:30pm followed by the sophomores at 8:45pm and the rest at 9pm.
“Sa tutoong kwento, lahat kayo pwede na mag-view ng 8:30. [In reality, everyone can view their grades by 8:30pm.] We’re just trying to make everything more efficient,” Surla admits.
The improved system made it easier for the students to view their grades, but for the USG and ITC, what happened during the online grade viewing did not go as planned. The schedule created by the USG to organize the students according to their batch was not followed.
The MLS scheduled 8pm downtime started earlier at 5pm and ended at 9pm.
Many professors also were not able to meet the deadline of the submission of grades. Some posted the grades during the following day on the grade consultation.
Surla informs that the professors who were not able to meet the deadline will have to go through a deal of paperwork before the ITC publishes the late grades. The faculty will also be reprimanded by their departments.
