Registration fees confusion

Mistakes in the payment and lodging of registration fees have left some DCU students without access to vital coursework in the last few weeks of the semester.

Confusion over this year’s registration fee increase from €863 to €938 has left some final year students not paying the full amount before the deadline last month.

This error has led to these students being blocked from accessing DCU computers as well as their Moodle and portal pages.

Along with these measures, students who accidentally paid the old fee have been asked to pay the €75 difference and a €170 late payment fine.

One final year student from the School of Communications has criticised the Fees Office for not giving him adequate warning about the issue.

“I was denied access to DCU computers and my Moodle and portal pages. I was given no prior notice about this, just an email saying that my access had already been denied,” he said.

“I am amazed at how they can so suddenly do something that has such a huge effect on students’ coursework – I am in my final year of college and a fail in any of my modules would mean that I could get no better mark than a pass.”

The student was asked to pay the €170 fine on top of the €75 that was owed.

“Paying the €75 was absolutely fine – I understood my simple mistake but I was shocked to see another charge of €170. Considering that I imagine people working in DCU to be genuine, decent people with common sense, I cannot understand why such a charge was lumped onto me.”

Another final year student was mistakenly blocked from accessing her DCU account even after paying the correct amount before the cut-off date.

She said: “I have to say fees have caused me such a hassle this year. I paid my registration on time but they [the Fees Office] obviously didn’t register it properly because I wasn’t registered as having paid which was ridiculous. That took a week to sort out.

“Then just last week I got an email saying my account has been disabled because I hadn’t paid my fees, which meant I couldn’t do one of my assignments until it got sorted.

“I obviously had paid because they had a copy of my receipt. It was clearly their fault, and I didn’t get any apology for it. It’s sorted now, but I can’t say I was at all happy with the service,” she added.
Another student suffered similar problems while attempting to register for a repeat module.

“I had to repeat a module so I had to wait to register after all other students,” said the student.

“The online registration system wasn’t working properly at the time so the registry sent around an email saying that repeat students should be able to register by a particular weekend but when the weekend came I still couldn’t register.

“Once I finally registered, I wanted to change modules and so I did that online.

“Then I wasn’t receiving any emails from my new class and I couldn’t access it on Moodle,” said the student.

“This went on for about two weeks. I went to the registry and they told me there was a problem with the online change of module system too,” added the student.

Student Fees Officer Deirdre Kelly reassured students that those who made ‘genuine mistakes’ will not be charged the late fine.

“With regard to genuine mistakes in payments made by students we will of course overlook the late payment fine. When students registered online the amount owed appeared on the screen. Students then had the option to pay online or request a bank giro”.

“Fees increase every year, our fees website is updated as soon as the fee increases are available and approved by the Budget Committee,” she said.

She advises any students experiencing similar problems to contact the Fees Office immediately.
“The Fees Office is located on the Ground Floor of the Administration Building. Staff are available to deal with any problems or queries a student may have with regard to their fees,” she said.