The EWS labs are a vital resouce for the majority of students in the College of Engineering. Even when it is possible to work on class content on personal computers, in the end programming assignments, hardware design, etc; must be completed or shown to be working on the EWS labs themselves in most cases, usually as a standard class requirement. The problem lies in that the EWS labs cannot handle the peak usage that they are made to deal with. Peak usage usually coincides with the approaching due dates of major class assignments, such as ECE 391, which requires a great deal of computing resources per student. Add to this the fact that many professors refuse to extend deadlines and there is a definite problem.

This is clearly a completely unfair stance to take. Students with more then one design/programming/project class will always have to choose which class to work on first. What happens then when EWS starts failing a full 48 hours before another due date? The assignment could be 90% complete, and only require testing or continued bug fixing, but without EWS access this may be impossible.

Therefore, we, the engineering students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign request that the current state of the EWS system be looked into as soon as possible.

Thank you.