Letter to the Editor: MU's Department of Information Technology is failing students
Published Aug. 31, 2010
If you don't realize it, we as students pay an information technology fee of a $183 for the fall semester. On top of our tuition and other fees, we hope that this additional fee that specifies for technology gives us good and working services. So far this semester I haven't seen my $183 fee come to use. The services we rely on have failed us more than once.
During the first week of class, I missed a class due to myZou being down for a while. Since I pay a substantial fee that is higher than our student healthcare or rec center fee, I expect myZou to work as that is our only source for our schedules. When it's down on a crucial day of the year, we need that site up and working. Even one of my teachers had to ask her assistant where her class was because she couldn't log onto myZou. To be fair, I can understand when new services or servers go down due to inexperience and instability of a new system like our email service did when they switched to Outlook a year ago. But, myZou has been around since I started coming here in fall of 2007. On top of that, IT had about three to four weeks from the summer semester to fall semester to repair and make sure the servers are ready for classes on Aug. 23. But on Monday, Aug. 23, when students keep getting a page with the words "internal server error," it was obvious they didn't repair or have the servers ready for class.
Now in the second week of classes, I saw at the library that the printing system is having issues where it can "take up to 10 minutes" for the "accept charges screen" to come up. For the second week in a row, our IT department has failed to deliver. If myZou down was bad enough, now people can't print off notes, papers, or anything important in a quick manner. Not everyone has a printer and it isn't uncommon that students are pressed for time during the day and can't spare ten minutes to print off something that should take no more than 30 seconds. This is unbelievable and unacceptable.
I hope the Department of IT figures out what to do since we each pay $183 and if you times that by about 30,000 students, which is roughly our total enrollment for undergrad and graduate students, equals a good amount of money. Because I know I'm not alone on how I feel when I say this but when I pay a lot of money for this school and especially for a fee that is supposed to provide me reliable services that are necessary for our education, I expect them to work.
Comments (4)
2:47 p.m., Aug. 31, 2010
Patrick said:
I didn't mention this as I was limited in space, but I was out of town from August 13 to the 22, and I didn't have internet installed until the 24. I wasn't even done moving into my apartment until the end of that Sunday before classes. I understand you may thing we are free loaders, but not everyone has access to internet, or have time to know until they are on campus during the week.
11:17 p.m., Sept. 1, 2010
Plan B said:
I stumbled on this as a '05 MU alumni and looking for what Pinkel will be trying this weekend after the clusterfuck of last month, but got a laugh out of this. I understand the outage may have been a complete disaster for many students but I recall the fond days of 2004 when my login didn't work and I got it printed by the fine folks at Jesse Hall after a 6.5 minute walk. Maybe this isn't the case any longer but some career advice - have a backup plan for when the shit hits the fan. In the meantime enjoy fark.com in the student computer centers.
10:37 p.m., Sept. 2, 2010
Brian said:
The servers that hold myZou received an update over the summer. During that update, the maximum number of simultaneous logins got decreased to something like 300 (when it was much higher than that before). That is why the server went down. Granted, they should've tested it a bit better. But, as an CS student, I know how easy it is to miss something in testing.
10:42 a.m., Aug. 31, 2010
John Doe said:
With all due respect, you should look at your schedule and room assignments before day one of class. Does the system have a fault, sure. But procrastinating and then blaming our own irresponsibility on IT isn't the mature thing to do.