For some students, changing the password to their MyQ account was easy, but for others they were alarmed and confused as to why they could not access their account. Users who neglected to make the changes encountered a troublesome, time-consuming experience at the help desk.
Going into effect Feb. 1, the policy required students, faculty and staff to change their passwords to include a minimum of eight characters, both upper and lowercase letters, a number and an optional special character.
“As of Monday, Feb. 27 we still had roughly 600 students who had not changed their password,” Quinnipiac’s Information Security Officer Brian Kelly said. “Faculty and staff numbers were lower and primarily part-timers who may not have been teaching this semester. All in all it went pretty well.”
As of March 5, there were 284 remaining faculty, 87 students and 174 staff members still in need of changing their passwords.
Users who have not changed their passwords were greeted with a flashing message when logged into MyQ indicating how many days they have to change their password.
“Those students, faculty and staff who did not change password were indeed ‘locked out.’ They had 14 days notice so in this case their procrastination hurt them,” Kelly said.
If a student is off campus they can indeed access the MyQ website and will then be prompted to change their password, Kelly said. Part of the problem was that users were on campus using BobcatNet, resulting in no other Internet connection once locked out.
Those who did not change their password before the deadline must visit the IT help desk in either the Arnold Bernard Library or Rocky Top Student Center, in order to change their password, Kelly said. Student workers help users fill out applications to update their passwords.
“We did send all users the instructions below via email everyday until the account expired. The instructions included steps to take in the event the account did expire. Again overall it went very smoothly. Users had 14 days that lasted 26 days in total.”
Once users change the passwords on their computers, they must do so on their smartphones or mobile devices or they will be locked out of the server again.
“For most people it was a pretty quick process but if they had a smartphone or other Internet device that connected to BobcatNet or QU email sometimes, they could get locked out again because those devices continued to try and connect with the old password,” said junior Corey Lynch, who works at both the York Hill and Mount Carmel IT help desks.
Students such as sophomore Rachel Conboy said she had a hassle-free experience changing her password. But, she noticed when logging in to buy a student ticket for the sporting events at the TD Bank Sport Center this weekend, she was unable to access the ticket website with her new password. Conboy said she was successful with her old password, and is unsure if the new password is in effect at all.
“We did have emails and phone calls to both my staff and the Help Desk but given the total number of users on campus the volume or percentage of calls/emails was very low,” Kelly said.
