BU Brain has given students a different reason to worry about class sign-ups.

For the past few weeks, students have been experiencing problems looking up and signing up for classes. Daniel Litt, a junior double-majoring in economics and geography, said that every time he tried to sign up for a class, the server didn’t respond, making a ten-minute process take hours.

“You have to start from square one every time the server cuts out in order to get to the right page to sign up for classes,” Litt said. “For people that compete for certain classes, this is a very stressful thing and having the Binghamton [University] server quit on you every two minutes can ruin people’s schedules, as well as cause problems for people that need to take certain classes for their majors.”

According to Binghamton University’s Information Technology Services (ITS), the system sometimes cannot handle the large amounts of students that are trying to use the system at once, especially during registration.

ITS had found a temporary fix by changing the session security setup process, so that now only personal and confidential information about students are encrypted. The system had been running smoothly since the change earlier in the week, but by Thursday it had slowed again.

Logan Robinson, the ITS Communications Manager, said that they are doing the best they can to stabilize the problem, but there will always be difficulties.

“In an environment as complex as a university, our ITS staff is constantly working to provide access to the systems we manage,” Robinson said. “No system is perfect, but ITS continues to work to provide safe and convenient access for all of campus.”

These problems, though, have wider consequences for the University. Jill Seymour, the associate director of Harpur Academic Advising, said advisers use BU Brain to pull up students’ audits as well as access the schedule of classes. She said that server problems complicated her job on several occasions, from Oct. 30 through Nov. 10.

“When we’re short-staffed, when [we] only have a very short amount of time with the student and the system’s not running, [we] can’t do what [we’re] supposed to do,” Seymour said. “It doesn’t make my job impossible, but it delays the amount of time I have to spend with a student because I’m dealing with mechanical issues and not dealing with the academic issues.”

Robinson attributed technical issues to the expansion of the system to accommodate more students, but said that some problems could not be foreseen.

“All of the servers were load tested to determine if they could handle the traffic they would encounter and passed testing,” Robinson said. “However, a true system load test is not attainable during summer months so some issues present themselves when the full campus population returns.”

However, some students believe that a school of BU’s size shouldn’t experience such problems. Amanda McDonnell, a junior majoring in neuroscience, said that the system’s unreliability made registration stressful.

“It was crashing when I was looking for classes and it crashed when I was registering,” McDonnell said. “It was nerve-wracking because there weren’t that many seats left in a couple of classes I needed.”

Greg Morley, a junior majoring in accounting, said he understood the reasons for delays but was still unhappy with the outcome.

“I think they’re probably doing the best they can, they’ve just never really had this many kids here, never experienced a fix-as-you-go thing,” Morley said. “I don’t blame them, it’s just frustrating.”