The fall semester is winding down, and with it comes the reminder of peppermint mochas, the holidays and temporary refuge from the demands of higher education.

But while some students anticipate dancing visions of holiday cheer, others are reminded of a slightly more dizzying notion: the chaotic prospect of yet another registration process, the scramble for classes and, worst of all, crashing them.

However, with the onset of Add Code 2.0, an automated wait-list system proposed for preliminary implication as early as Spring 2007, students and professors may be spared the hassle of registration mayhem.

“Crashing has become a negative culture on this campus,” said San Diego State Associated Students Vice President of University Affairs John Ly, who is spearheading the system’s creation along with Javier Gudino, director of Enrollment Services.

Add Code 2.0 was created primarily “to help students who need a class to get it,” Gudino said. “But we wanted to put a little more intelligence behind it.”

By intelligence, Gudino is referring to a system that could break down graduation priorities for SDSU’s thousands of enrolled students and automatically distribute add codes online without ever requiring students to physically crash classes.

The new system also avoids confusion between professors and students who don’t have the prerequisites to be in a class.

While the existing WebPortal registration system bars certain students from adding classes they haven’t fulfilled requirements for, the incorporation of Add Code 2.0 would filter the impacted pool of already-qualified students by giving priority to those who need it most.

“Currently, (professors) don’t know the student’s major or whether they should even be in the class (when they crash in person),” Gudino said.

According to the Add Code 2.0 proposal presented to the A.S. Council last month, the “add codes list will be ranked by a sophisticated algorithm that factor in students’ total units, ? relevance to current major, proximity to graduation (or) existence on graduation plans.”

For both students and professors, the process eliminates stressful bouts of add-code bartering during a crashing period by generating an automatically prioritized wait-list.

Despite the system’s reliance on pre-programmed criteria, it doesn’t overlook the necessity of special-case attention.

“Faculty will have the ability to manually add students (or) have the option to activate ‘automatic choice’ option, which will automatically notify the student at the top of the ranked list when a seat becomes available,” according to the proposal.

But students concerned about the rigidness of an automated system fear that it may take away the “human face” to registration and limit student ability to rightfully manipulate the crashing process.

“While we used to be able to get a feel for how a class was by crashing it and meeting the professor, we could be limited to the impersonal filtering of another bureaucratic system,” business management junior Brian Cleeland said.

In response to the possibility that students may also be unable to wait-list a specific section once a course’s capacity has been reached, A.S. President Pro Tempore Garrett Hazelton said to Gudino and his staff that “it would be a great disturbance for the students” to not be able to exercise their right of choosing a particular professor.

But the convenience of an online wait-list system and the prospect of a crash-free registration fuels optimism for the project, as well.

“For a university this size that faces so much impaction, the more we can do online without the waiting around for classes like we do each semester would be a huge advantage,” international business junior Ben Montgomery said.

“It’s still a work in progress,” Gudino said about the fledgling program. “It’s all in the mindset of helping students get their classes.”