Registering for Classes at UWI (University of the West Indies)
Registering for classes at UWI can be a pretty complex process, as there’s no direction about what to do, this guide will walk you through the process.
Let me just drop this in here, you can graduate from UWI without a degree, for this reason, it is best not to do all your foundation courses but to leave one until your last semester. The reason for this is that UWI will force you to graduate once you’ve reached the minimum credit requirement, no questions asked. Now, lets get up beat and jump in!
If you don’t want to read the written version, refer to the video tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y1jvG9D0iM
The First Step is to go to UWI’s website for registration — https://sas.mona.uwi.edu/
You’ll want to click on the first link “Enter Secure Area”.
This is where you’ll enter your ID and password, your default password will be your Date of Birth in the format YYYYMMDD. You should already have your id ready, if you do not remember it, check your email for an email with the subject:
“Offer of Entry to The University of the West Indies”
Once you’re logged in, you may be presented with a financial clearance notice, this will appear if you haven’t paid your full tuition yet, click agree to proceed.
On the next page you will be presented with two options, Personal Information and Student Services. The Personal Information Section contains the information you submitted upon applying for entry into the University. You’ll want to select the Student Services link to register for your courses.
In this section you’ll want to click the first option, “Registration”, you can snoop around the rest of the system later but lets focus on the important things now.
Speaking of important, you can’t move forward without this: https://www.mona.uwi.edu/programmes , select the program you want, you can find it by clicking the letter it starts with or scrolling down till you see a search bar where you can search for the program by keyword.
Click the program then look to the lower right hand side of the screen, below the APPLY NOW button, you’ll see a set of links, click either the handbook or course information link, either of these will open or prompt the download of a file which will list the courses you need to register for.
Now we can move on, Click the registration link, you’ll see some more links, the first thing you’ll want to do is select a semester.
Select semester 1 from the dropdown then click submit.
You’ll be brought back to the previous page, you’ll then want to select “Look Up Classes To Add”, this will bring you to the page where you’ll be able to select your courses.
There are a few things on this page you need to understand.
There are a few different types of courses you’ll register for, not all subjects will have all types of courses. The types are denoted by letters
M — This denotes a lecture, these are classes where the lecturer teaches the material
T — This denotes a tutorial, which is a more practical class where practice is done
B — This denotes a lab, where what you learnt will be tested (it can also be tested in tutorials), however labs are generally longer, more challenging and are weighted more.
S — This denotes a seminar, which are essentially tutorials but may be longer.
The letters are accompanied by numbers after them, the numbers signify the order they are, e.g if a lecture is the first lecture stream of the week it will be labeled M11, if it is the second, it will be labelled M12, a stream is a group of classes.
The total credit hours is the current amount of credits you’ve registered for, the billing hours is the usually the same. The Minimum Hours is the minimum amount of credits you’re allowed to register for, and the Maximum is just the opposite.
Now that you understand all this, click the Class Search button to begin adding classes.
On this page, you’ll select the subject area you want to register for, then click the Course Search button.
You’ll be brought to the page below which lists the courses of the subject area you selected, click the View Sections button next to the course you want to register for.
Upon clicking the view sections button, you’ll be brought to a page which lists the different sections of the course that you can register for.
Some more things to know here, take a look at the column headers very carefully.
Select — this is a checkbox or where you will click to register for the section of the course, you will see a “C” if the class is already full.
Crse — the course number
Sec — The section type, Lab, Tutorial, Lecture or Seminar
Cmp — The campus — M for Mona , W or WC for Western Campus.
Cred — The credits, only the Lecture will have the credit number, it’s accompanying sections/classes will have 0.
Days — R is for Thursday, S is for Saturday
Time — Note these well, as you do not want clashes
Cap — The amount of students that can be accommodated in the class
Act — The number of students registered for the class
Rem — The number of remaining spaces
Instructor — the name of the instructor
Date — The length of time the course will last for, generally there are 3 lengths — half a semester, full semester and full year courses.
Location — This will be the bane of you, while you take your time to get to know where everything is, note this very well.
When you’re finished clicking the checkboxes, scroll down and click register.
You’ll be brought back to this page where you’ll see your courses added, if you experience errors, then scroll down to the error section of this guide to resolve them.
If you made a mistake or want to add different classes, simply click the drop down and Web Drop the classes then click the submit changes button at the bottom of the page.
To see your schedule to check that everything is okay after you’ve finished registering, go back to the registration menu and click Student Schedule by Day & Time.
You’ll see your courses listed in a schedule by week, please glance around this page, click links and you’ll be provided with extra information. Any clashes or notable things will be displayed below the time table.
Campus Restriction Error
This means the course you selected was from a different campus, not the campus you applied for. You’ll need to go back and select the course from the right campus
Linked Course/Duplicate Course
Linked Course required — Courses are often if not always paired with other courses, e.g if you’re doing the course 1126 , you’ll need the lecture, a lab and two tutorials, one in each half of the week. There are also other courses with different linked course requirements.
Duplicate course — in this instance, I selected two labs, only 1 lab can be selected.
Lecturer Approval Required
This means that the lecturer in charge of the courses needs to approve you before you are registered for it, you’ll need to send an override request which will be shown in the next section.
Pre-requisite and Test Score error
This may indicate a few things
That you may not have a subject or course required to do the course
You did not get the required grade in the required course to do course
There is an error in UWI’s system (this is more common than you think)
It’s a complex system, which is far from perfect so you will experience odd errors sometimes, even if the person next to you isn’t.
Requesting an Override
An override request is necessary when you run into problems registering for a course.
Click the Request Override button.
Submitting the Request
Select the course you want to request the override for from the course dropdown on the left hand side then state the reason for the request on the right hand side, then click submit.
That’s all, now all that’s left to do is wait, or try to contact the lecturer in charge of the course to get your override approved faster.
Originally published at www.romariofitzgerald.com on September 3, 2017.