August 29, 2008

Schedulizer Is Back At C.U. Following Registrar Scuffle

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After just over 24 hours without service, the familiar tabs and lists of Schedulizer.com are once again active. Schedulizer CEO Jay Searson ’08 put the site back online around 8:20 p.m. last night, citing the willingness of the Registrar to work with the website and the outpouring of student support as the two main causes.
“We’ve got a meeting with the Registrar, and we’re going to work with them to keep Cornell accurate,” Searson said. “We haven’t come to any firm agreements, but we are very, very optimistic.”
However, he added that the student support that Schedulizer received, in all forms — from protesting students to e-mails of support — was what eventually made them put the site back up.
“We got a lot of e-mails saying that even with the inaccuracies, they just wanted Schedulizer back,” Searson said. “Even with the inaccuracies, it’s so much more convenient. And for many departments we were still on the nose.”
Searson hopes that he and the Registrar’s Office will be able to come up with an easily automatable format for course listings, something that he says should not be too difficult to accomplish. Then, he says, Schedulizer will be even more accurate.
For now, though, Schedulizer warns students to double-check their schedules to make sure they are accurate.
“We have a system for manual updates in place and we’re going to try to keep it as accurate as we can,” Searson said. “If someone notices an error, they can tell us and we can fix it. We just don’t have any way of automating it.”
Nonetheless, Searson is happy to be back. And, it seems, Cornell students feel the same way.
“We were just really overwhelmed and floored by the level of support we got from the Cornell community,” Searson said. “We are thankful and we are proud to serve the Cornell community.”