Students at a handful of universities have created web- and phone-based applications that are helping their peers navigate the often confusing process of course registration, as Ariel Kaminer reports in the New York Times.

At schools such as Rutgers, Brown University, and UC-Berkeley, those applications are moving legacy registrar systems into the 21st century. For the lucky students accessing the new technology, the registration process has become automated, faster, and more customizable.

For example, if someone drops a high-demand course, a student with a particular application can receive a notification and register instantly. Other apps allow students to easily discover an interesting elective or see which courses their friends have signed up for.

Kaminer points out that while some schools have embraced the innovations, not all universities have welcomed them, whether because of worries about complying with student privacy laws or concerns about potential harm to existing computer systems.

Harry R. Lewis, the director of undergraduate studies for Harvard’s computer science department, told Kaminer that “students are always more entrepreneurial and understand needs better than bureaucracies…since bureaucracies tend to have messages they want to spin, and priorities they have to set, [while] students just want stuff that is useful.”