While more and more universities in Vietnam have gone hi-tech by allowing students to register for courses online before the start of every new semester, the registration is in fact a nightmare for students as the educational institutions just fail to ensure they have adequate tech infrastructure for the process.

Students at some universities have complained that the arduous online course registration even led to them graduating later than expected, but school management said these cases are rare.

Even so, some educational institutions admitted that they do not have adequate systems to ensure efficient Internet-based course registration for students.

One of the most common issues for many universities is that their websites will crash whenever too many students access the systems at a time.

Even when students were able to log in and complete the registration, their selected courses would just ‘disappear’ from the system, meaning they had to do everything again, they complained to Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.

For instance, a student of Ho Chi Minh City University of Foreign Languages and Information Technology (HUFLIT) said she successfully registered for all the courses required for the new semester in the morning, only to find out in the afternoon of the same day that “none of the courses I had selected was included in my academic schedule.”

Even worse, there were cases when all the course registration students sweated to complete were deemed ‘inappropriate’ due to ‘technical errors’ of the systems.

“The school deleted all of the course registration that we made in the morning and told us that another session for doing the process again would be held at 6:00 pm,” one student of Van Lang University in Ho Chi Minh City recalled.

“So we all accessed the school website at 5:45 pm, but more than two and half an hours later, no ‘registration session’ was opened.”

Students also complained that the system would allow courses to be ‘over-booked,’ meaning some classes have more students than should, while others had to be canceled due to the insufficient number of registered learners.

In the second semester of the academic year 2017-18, the Banking University Ho Chi Minh City had 40 classes cancelled while the National Economics University and University of Languages and International Studies, both in Hanoi, had to cancel 4 and 37 classes, respectively.

In response to students’ complaints, many universities require students to complete the online course registration on different days, depending on their faculties and years of study.

“However, students tend to pay no attention the announcement and all rush to the registration website on the first day, causing the website to crash,” said Pham Thai Son, director of admission and communication of Ho Chi Minh City University of Food Industry.

Phan Ngoc Minh, head of the training department at Banking University Ho Chi Minh City, said while some students did have their graduation delayed due to problems in course registration, the phenomenon is rare and “only a few students were affected.”

A vice president of a public university in Ho Chi Minh City admitted that while many universities try to implement technology in course registration, they lack the infrastructure needed to ensure the process will run smoothly, with financial inability mostly to blame.

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