Introduction

Dear first-year people,

At The Karlovian, we understand how intimidating it is to deal with the SIS website. Even after years of using it, it still has secrets for us! So we wrote this guide, compiling all our knowledge and complementing it with screenshots to help you make your first steps in the SIS world easier.

Yours,

The Karlovian Admin Team

Course Enrollment

One of the first things you will need to do as a first-year is to enroll in your subjects on the date of enrollment. Just a heads-up, chances are the website will crash. It’s really old and we are a lot of students, so here are some tricks to help you make the experience as smooth as possible:

Before you start enrolling

1. Make sure you are in a stable environment with a stable and strong WiFi connection.

2. Have several devices with you e.g. Your laptop, phone, tablet…

3. Know your login details (student number + password) and log in before the enrollment starts. Once it’s time, just hit refresh.

4. Design a plan and prioritise mandatory subjects over electives. You can find a list of the PPE subjects here and which subjects are recommended for which year of study if you:

• Log into SIS
• Click on “Subjects and Schedule Registration”
• Click on “Enrollment (Study Plan)”
• Go to “Recommended Study Year” and select “1. Study Year”
• Make sure above the “Recommended Study Year”, where it says “Year and Semester” you have selected “2024/2025, winter semester”

Below you have a screenshot of a first-year schedule for 2023/2024. Please note that this year, Introduction to Statistics is being replaced with Economic Reasoning.

During Enrollment

• Stay calm and expect the SIS to crash. Keep hitting reload on all your devices until one of them works. Once it does, discard the rest.

• Click on “Subjects and Schedule Registration”

• Once you do that, you will be automatically led to the “Enrolled” section. It will be empty because you haven’t yet enrolled in any subject. Go to the top of your screen and select “Enrollment (Study Plan)”.

• In the “Enrollment (Study Plan)” section you will be presented with two lists of subjects; Mandatories at the top and Required With an Alternative (electives) at the bottom. We recommend not picking more than seven subjects in your first semester, but it’s entirely up to you. 

• To enroll in a subject, just press the green tick next to the subject’s title, scroll down, and press validate. You have to enroll in subjects one by one. Once your enrollment is validated, it should appear in the Enrolled section.

• Some subjects have different schedule options. The selection of the schedule happens during enrolment, and it won’t appear in the enrolled section until you select a schedule option.

After enrolling

• Make sure you have enough time to transfer between buildings in between classes. Economic subjects take place in Opletalova (City Centre), Politics and Philosophy subjects take place in Jinonice (South West of the city), and some language courses take place in Hollar (Next to the National Theatre). We recommend leaving roughly 40 minutes to transfer between Jinonice and Opletalova, and 20 between Opletalova and Hollar and Hollar and Jinonice. To check out your schedule, click on Schedule NG.

• If you are not sure in which building your subject takes place, look at the classroom number. Classrooms in Hollar and Opletalova have, respectively, an H and an O at the beginning of the number, while Jinonice classrooms have a B or a C.

• If you are tight on time or your classes overlap, you might want to consider deregistering from the least important class. 

• If you tried to enroll in a class, mandatory or elective, but it was full already, it’s possible to write to the professor and ask if it would be okay to manually register you in the subject. Express why you would like to attend their class and also understand that it might not be possible to do so.

• Check out the description of each course, read the syllabus if it is there. Some professors upload the readings directly to SIS, some to Moodle 1, and some to Moodle 2. Trust us, you don’t want to find yourself the night before the first day of class scrabbling around three different systems looking for a file.

• And lastly, get yourself a sweet treat. You earned it.

Signing up for exams 

Exam date registration 

Exam dates will typically become available for sign up about a month before the exam season begins and each class will usually have at least three different exam dates available for selection. It’s a good idea to sign up for your preferred exam date as soon as possible because some dates can fill up quickly, especially for smaller classes.  

Once on the ‘Exam Dates’ tab, select the ‘Register’ heading at the top and you should see a list of all your available exam dates, the type of exam, date and time of the exam, the building and room number. You will also be able to see here the capacity for each date and the number of available slots. Be careful, many exam dates will have a limit for when you can no longer register (usually a couple days beforehand) and no longer deregister (usually the night before.) 

In this list, you may also see exam dates under the names ‘Defence of Bachelor Thesis,’ ‘Philosophy,’ ‘Politics’ or ‘Economics.’ You can ignore these, they pertain to your final state examinations and thesis defence in your final year of studies. 

If you fail an exam

If you fail an exam for a class you can retake twice during the same exam period (a total of three attempts). However you can only retake if you fail, if you receive a passing grade (A to E) you may not retake the exam.

However, if you fail the exam on all three attempts within one semester, your ‘first try’ of the course will be graded as a fail and that goes on your grade transcript. If this happens with a mandatory course (Ex. Principles of Economics I or II), then you will have to retake the entire course the following academic year. If this happens with an elective or elective mandatory course then you can choose to retake the course or simply choose a different course to fulfill those credit requirements. It is worth noting, however, that mandatory and elective courses can be taken a maximum of two times during the whole of your studies; optional courses may only be taken once. This means that if you fail a mandatory course twice, your studies will be terminated.

Advanced Features

Generating a summary of results with GPA

Sometimes you will need to get a document with all the results from your university studies and your GPA (grade point average). That may be useful when you apply for internships, for example. Follow these steps:

• Log into SIS

• Go to “Summary of exam results”

• Press one of two yellowish Adobe Acrobat symbols. The left one for the ordinary transcript, the right one if you want a digitally signed one.

Generating a confirmation of studies

You will frequently need a confirmation of studies for different administrative purposes. The dormitory accommodation office will always require one. Since going all the way to Hollar and adjusting your schedule to fit the office hours of the International Office is not an option, follow these steps:

• Log into SIS

• Press “Settings/information” button

• Choose “Print Confirmation” in the green line above

• Choose whichever option works for you

Calculating the scholarship average

Students with the best results are sometimes awarded scholarships from the programme and the faculty. They are awarded automatically based on your scholarship average but sometimes the system makes mistakes. And, it is simply useful to know your data. There is a convenient built-in tool in the SIS to help you calculate the scholarship average since it is different from the standard academic average which you can get in the first part of the “Advanced Features”: 

• Log into SIS

• Go to “Summary of exam results”

• Choose “Validations” in the green line above

• Press “Do” in the “Calculate scholarship average” line
• Check the results below

Extending staying logged in time

The default time you stay logged in is 1 hour. It is renewed every time you do something in the system. However, if you are working on something outside the system, you might get logged out. It is quite inconvenient and sometimes causes irritation. Here’s how you can prolong this time to 480 mins:

• Log into SIS

• Press “Settings/information” button

• Choose “User options” in the green line above

1. Select “Extended logon time”

Who is Who system and showing/hiding your own data there

Who is Who is a built-in function to find faculty staff or fellow students  based on limited stuff you know about them. It allows you to access their contact data, photo and in some cases, even dormitory room number (it depends on which info they decided to display).

Accessing the Who is Who system:

• Log into SIS

• Go to “Who is Who”

• Select relevant options

• Choose the person you are looking for from the list below

There may be a note below that there are some profiles you do not have access to. If you can’t find the person you need in tne list, it means that they probably restricted access to their profile.

Hiding/showing your profile:

• Log into SIS

• Press “Settings/information” button

• Choose “User options” in the green line above

• Select the options you like in the “Who is Who” part

Selecting the data which will be displayed in your profile:

• Log into SIS

• Press “Settings/information” button

• Choose “To be displayed” in the green line above

• Check all the boxes connected to the information you would like to share with others

Written by María Miralles i Viu, Alicia Ross-Adams and Yaroslav Dudko