CRISP: An interactive student registration system

A class project, even for an advanced class in systems programming, is usually simplified to make it possible to achieve success. A conflicting goal is to produce a realistic enough system to warrant production use, so as to provide the class with sufficient motivation and the right kind of system experience. The problem is compounded when the resulting system is to be a component in an on-going information-processing system and must be compatible with it - with existing documents and procedures, with unstated assumptions about the data and about the current algorithms used to process the data, and with the social and institutional traditions that surround it. This paper reports on one successful class project of this kind.