In the 2025 fall term, Knox announced that class registration would no longer require students to meet with their advisors to officially choose classes and would instead be something students could do on their own. It was required for students to meet with advisors to discuss classes and be approved for registration, but there was no middleman between students and the direct action of signing up for their courses.
College Registrar Patrick Hathaway states that changing the class registration system has been a work in progress since before he arrived at Knox in 2025.
“There had been a conversation about moving to a new system that predated my time in Knox…but the work didn’t actually start until around the time I started,” Hathaway said.
Allowing students to register for their own classes is part of an effort to have students gain more autonomy over their academic choices. In the old system, only advisors had access to sign students up for classes, waive classes, etc. Now, with the online system, students no longer have to email advisors to change classes but can rely on themselves instead.
“What we’ve done with the new system is we’re trying to break up the registration process into kind of two separate parts,” Hathaway said. “We want students to meet with their advisors [and] not just meet to register for classes. We’re trying to emphasize that the point of the meeting with your advisor is to sit down, work out a plan.”
Hathaway also explains what the second part of the registration process should look like for students.
“Then the less glamorous piece is you log into the system, and you click the button to register for classes. It was previously the advisor who did this, but we wanted to give students more opportunity to think about what they were doing as far as the courses they were taking…we wanted to give students more autonomy,” he said.
The new J1 registration system by Jenzabar had a few setbacks during class enrollment at the end of the fall term, such as prerequisite waivers not going through or missing credits, but Hathaway states that it’s just some of the growing pains of a new system.
“When you switch over to a new software system, there’s going to be some things that you think work one way, but then you find out they work another way,” he said. “So we have to kind of work our way back to re-evaluate the process [regarding] what worked, what didn’t work, and then coming up with a new way to do it in the future.”
The advising worksheet in the new My. Knox student profile looks vastly different from the previous website, not only due to the change in website, but also because the worksheet was rebuilt from the “ground up” by IT and the Registrar.
“We had a consultant who looked through the [class] catalog and was helping us rebuild all the programs from the ground up,” Hathaway said. “For some instances, some requirements that were written in the catalog were maybe a little more ambiguous than we would have liked…[so] conversations with departments were had when we would run into issues like that…”
According to Hathaway, the registrar is adapting well to the changes, and despite a few hiccups here and there, if any students email him with concerns, he wants to assure that they will be handled.
“Our office kind of needs to be adaptable, needs to be able to change when the college changes. Policy changes all the time,” he said. “I do get a lot of emails, though not all related to J1. But the big thing that I want to get out there is that even if you [students] don’t get a response from me, I will see your emails and I will do the things that you have asked me to do. I may not always respond, but everything you send me, I read.”
Overall, the new system has made many aspects of registration easier than they were before. According to Hathaway, the changes have been for the better.
“I do think that moving to a new system is good. The old system that we were using first launched in the early 90s. It was at the end of its lifespan,” he said. “The new system does have a lot of tools that make some of our things easier. It’s much easier to create classes, and we now control every piece of what My. Knox looks like.”
Hathaway assures that any issues are just the process of reevaluating and getting used to the new system.
