Add/drop deadlines to change next year

By Catherine Bratic     10/2/08 7:00pm

Starting next fall, add/drop deadlines will be moved up, giving students half as much time to make decisions about whether or not to add or keep a course compared to the current schedule. Currently, students have four weeks to add a course. During the first two weeks, students can do so without a fee. Next year, however, students will have one week to add a course without a fee followed by two weeks to add with a fee.

The current deadline for dropping a course is in the 10th week of classes, around most courses' midterms. Next year's academic calendar moves that deadline up to the fifth week of school.

While the 2009-'10 academic calendar was approved in January, this issue has not been brought up until recently, Registrar David Tenney (Sid Rich '87) said.

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"Realistically, nobody has been thinking that far ahead," Tenney said.

Student Association Academics Committee co-chair Jasdeep Mangat brought the shortened add/ drop deadlines to the attention of the student senate at this Monday's meeting. Mangat, a Brown College senior, said these deadlines were largely overlooked by students as well as faculty because of larger issues with the calendar at the time.

When the academic calendar for next year was being discussed last fall, most of the concerns that were voiced centered on the possible elimination of the spring recess, Evan Siemann, the director of the Faculty Senate's academic calendar committee, said.

"Students were so intent on that particular feature of the calendar that this didn't get thought about as much," Siemann said.

Siemann said the change was motivated by professors' desires to solidify their class rosters earlier in the semester. Under the current schedule, students can theoretically walk into a course for the first time in the fifth week of school.

"From a faculty perspective, the thing that's difficult about the current add/drop deadlines is that you don't know who's in your class for a long period of time," Siemann said.

Siemann also emphasized that with the growth planned for the university, classroom assignments were only going to become more difficult, and having complete class lists earlier on would make that process simpler.

Tenney said a main concern is having students enrolled in classes that have already missed significant amounts of important material for that class.

"Where it particularly hurts is when they're adding on the last day of week four and showing up for class maybe possibly for the first time on Monday or Tuesday of week five, with already a third of the semester complete," Tenney said.

While Siemann stressed that Faculty Senate members would be very reluctant to revisit the calendar, Speaker of the Faculty Senate Deborah Harter said that change was not irreversible at this point.

"If this seems like a problem, we can talk about that as a senate, and we have plenty of time to change that for next year," Harter said.

Tenney said he will meet with Student Association President Matt Youn and Mangat this week to discuss options for next year's add/drop deadlines.

Sarah Rutledge and Jocelyn Wright contributed to this article.

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