Drop the deadline

For IU students, the scarlet letter is not an A, but a W.

Withdraw from a course after the beginning of the second week of the semester, and the dreaded W will land on your transcript.

What most students know, of course, is that planning a semester of classes is no simple matter. Published course descriptions rarely provide enough information to gauge a professor’s pedagogical style, the course workload or even a student’s interest in the material.

Unfortunately, the withdraw policy interprets and advertises students’ quest for the perfect schedule as academic flakiness.

Au contraire! It takes nothing less than serious commitment to navigate the drop/add process.

I suspect many administrators would be willing to acknowledge this – to be sure, students can be academically committed. We have, after all, remained in college, paying tuition even as it has increased annually at a rate 1.2 to 2.1 times the general inflation rate for the past four decades.

The withdraw policy is academically shortsighted, but it seems likely it was made for business interests.

If a rather draconian academic penalty is applied to students who decide two weeks into the semester that they would prefer to spend the next 14 weeks in, say, a history rather than a psychology class, the University can bet that less students will be inclined to change their schedules, and administrators can more accurately gauge what classes they need to employ professors to teach.

The argument is probably that students would have to shoulder tuition increases in anticipation of rampant infidelity to their chosen classes if the drop deadline were made more lax. But the fact of the matter is that, provided our courses are reasonably similar to what we have anticipated, we as students face our own incentives to stick with our original schedule.

Most of us want to retain our status as full time students without burning out three-quarters of the way through the semester. That means we are unlikely to take more than 18 credit hours or less than 12. Because most classes are already full at the beginning of the semester, our dropping cannot be excessive if we hope to maintain that golden equilibrium.

Moving toward a less punitive drop policy reflects what is standard at many other universities. For example, the College of Literature, Science and the Arts at the University of Michigan allows students to drop classes until the end of the third week without the W penalty.

This policy is far more reasonable.

Imposing a stiffer drop deadline than is standard at other universities does not produce more upstanding students; it only makes graduate school admissions committees and future employers will only think we have not measured up.


E-mail: wallacen@indiana.edu