Students who tried to log on to computers in the Computer Assisted Instruction Lab – or as most students on campus call it, the Computer Lab – Tuesday morning following the Labor Day weekend, were greeted with a surprise … but it was hardly the kind one would hope to receive on Christmas or a birthday.

The original confusion of the first day of the new program’s implementation died down by Wednesday. However, by Thursday evening there was still enough bugs in the program that it was decided to disconnect it while they could be worked out.

For a while, though, students found themselves face-to-face with a new log-on program called the Positive Attendance Analysis that caught everyone off guard.

Some students became impatient as they tried to figure out how to use it, while others became frustrated as their already established log-on passwords were lost in the midst of the change, and they had to go through the process of getting new passwords again.

Lab aides, who were also caught off guard by the new program were kept busy most of the morning helping students figure out the system.

The whole idea of logging-on to the computers is a concept that is relatively new.

According to lab aide, Angel Esguerra, the log-on program, tied to students’ I.D.s was originally implemented one-and-a-half to two years ago for security purposes.

This new version is simply the evolution of the program.

Esguerra said that with any new thing they implement, they are always trying to find ways to make it better.

Apparently, before the log-on program, anyone – including people without ties to Cerritos College – could go into the lab and use the computers.

Esguerra says, because of that, sometimes there would not be computers available for use by actual students.

Soon, however, the school realized that if it kept track of certain subjects students were working on, it could use the information to get more money from the state.

Logging-on to the Positive Attendance Analysis program does take an extra 30 seconds or so to do, and that was more time than most students had.

Many of them quickly found that with one click of their mouse they could override the program.

The school is hoping that the new program will be more trouble to override than simply going ahead and logging on, thus enabling it to gather information that can be used to receive more funding from the state.

CAI lab supervisor, Masoud Alavial said, “This is a program that Cerritos College implemented to gather the number of hours the students work on computers that we provide assisted instruction on so that we can collect from Sacramento, proper funding for improvement of all computing areas.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Cerritos College freshman, Musbassum Shafique, who was at a computer as his friend, Hector Moreno logged on said, “Oh, you’ve got to log-on to that stupid new thing.”

When they found out the benefits to the school of the new program, Shafique said that he wouldn’t mind it, and Moreno said, “It’s cool because it’s a benefit to the school.”

Some students, like computer science major, Emmanuel Martinez will never get used to the new program. He said, “I still prefer the old way because it was faster.”

Although the recent governor’s budget cuts to community colleges has been affecting programs on campus, Alavial says it is only a coincidence that the PAA program is being implemented now.

The way the program works is, a student simply has to type in his or her “user I.D.,” then press “enter.” The student’s name and student number will come up, along with a list of any classes that student might be enrolled in that the school “tracks.”

The computer will then keep track of the amount of time that student spends on that class.