Students in the College received an e-mail Sept. 3 from "College of Arts Sciences & Advising," reminding them that the add/drop deadline for College students would soon be approaching. Tomorrow is the last day to add new courses or to change a course's grading option. Wednesday is the last day to drop a class.
If the add date seems to be coming up quicker than usual for students, it is. Last year, the add deadline was Sept. 11, and in 2008 the date was Sept. 12. In both instances, the add deadline was on a Friday, not midweek as will be the case this year. Also new is that the drop deadline will precede the add deadline - in years past, the course-add deadline has occurred about a week after the drop date. Relatively small changes, to be sure, but enough to cause some unexpected shuffling among students' academic plans for the semester.
What may cause students the most trouble are the Student Information System waiting lists. According to the e-mail, "the waitlist will run for the last time on Tuesday morning at around 2:00 A.M. We ask that you remember to remove yourself from the waitlists of any classes you no longer want to add." The problem is that if students remain on waiting lists for classes they do not plan to take, they may be added to a course unknowingly and then unable to drop at a later date. Moving the add deadline ahead of the drop deadline helps a great deal to prevent scheduling nightmares - i.e., students being added into classes accidentally and then unable to drop them after the fact. Even so, students need to pay especially close attention to their SIS accounts during the next week to make sure there are no surprises.
As always, students must be responsible for keeping up with changes involving enrollment issues and the like. But College administrators must do their part to keep everyone informed. It also is advantageous when the rationale for changing policies or schedules can be clearly explained to students - not only for informational purposes but also to help the changes "stick" in students' memories a little better. Planning courses can be tricky at a school with more than 14,000 undergraduate students, and because third- and fourth-year students have become accustomed to a certain routine when it comes to selecting classes, any alterations to the add/drop process are a bigger deal than administrators may realize.
As is, the timeline for course selection is fairly constrained, and the process bureaucratic. Two weeks is not a particularly long time to select classes when course descriptions are brief and oftentimes not available on SIS. The real issue, however, is that enrollment in many courses is capped, and students often need multiple backups simply to ensure they meet requirements, let alone take classes that capture their interests. When students are having to juggle these multiple options, it is likely their schedules will not begin to shape up until the add/drop deadlines hit. That means any time for academic exploration can be virtually nonexistent.
Yale University's system is a better model to consider. It has a "shopping period" for the first two weeks of classes -
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