CSI’s new multi-factor authentication has made students more frustrated than ever, due to the required procedure that lets them access personal information.
By: Fiona Donovan
A few days before the fall semester, we students were lucky enough to receive an email stating that CSI had implemented new authentication that would need to be set up in order for us to access all of our information.
I’m sure many people were lucky enough to set up the new mobile authenticator with no problem. However, I was not, along with many other students who were waiting outside the help desk office on August 25th.
The directions were simple: log into CUNYfirst, press allow, set up your device in the Microsoft Authentication app, boom, you’re done. Yet, many of us here at CSI tried that over and over, which led to us getting locked out of our accounts.
The help desk, along with all of the other resources here on campus, never picked up the phone. That led to plenty of students having to come to campus the day before school started to join a queue to simply ask the help desk faculty to unlock our accounts.
Thankfully, they were able to help and granted me access to my classes. Now the next problem that arose, is needing to pull out your phone everytime you have to log into your account.
Many professors do not like the use of phones in their classrooms. Yet, that is not possible when I need to pull out my phone every 20 minutes to get the code to log onto my account.
To help solve this problem, MFA should allow us to trust our devices for 30 days. This would lead to less stress on us students, and eliminate being yelled at for pulling out our phones to do a simple task. It would make the process of getting onto our accounts so much smoother.
You know what they say, “Think smarter, not harder.”
