Drop It Like It’s Hot

Students may have noticed a few more empty chairs in classes since March 27, the deadline for students in the School of Engineering and Applied Science to drop courses. The University’s three other undergraduate schools adhere to a drop date a full month earlier—this semester, Feb. 26. In classes that enroll students from multiple schools, the extra weeks granted to engineering students are unfair. Drop dates should be tied to—and uniform within—individual classes so that students from different schools cannot drop the same class at different times.

The discrepancy arose in 2000, when the Columbia College Committee on Instruction (COI) cut the CC drop date from 11 weeks after the start of a semester to five. The change was intended to discourage students from occupying spots in classes that they expected to drop in the end. At the time, students expressed concern that truncating the drop period would make it difficult for them to assess their grade prospects before deciding whether to drop courses with which they were struggling. The SEAS Committee on Instruction agreed and decided not to shorten engineering students’ drop period to five weeks. As a result, whereas SEAS students can weigh their options for almost three months, students in CC, the School of General Studies, and Barnard College are often forced to make the call before taking midterms or receiving any graded work. While giving SEAS students extra time to manage difficult engineering, math, and science classes may be warranted, their extended drop window affords them a significant advantage in courses taken in other divisions of the University.

Instead of determining drop dates based on a student’s school, the four colleges should enforce a consistent drop date for each of the courses it offers, regardless of who is enrolled. Students who cross-register ought to play by the same rules as their classmates. Within any given class, students of all academic backgrounds should be given equal opportunity to test the waters without committing themselves to courses that might, in the end, damage their GPAs. As it stands, SEAS students taking humanities and some science classes benefit from an extra four-week grace period during which they can work to improve bad early grades while keeping an escape plan in tow.

Liberal-arts and science students taking SEAS courses do not enjoy the same luxury. Since exams in such classes are timed primarily with SEAS students in mind, students from other schools may get no substantive grade feedback in time to assess their prospects before the drop deadline. Perversely, the current system dissuades nonengineers from exploring engineering classes while putting them at a disadvantage on their own academic turf.

Each college’s COI should have full discretion to set the drop date for the classes it offers, but it should not stipulate drop dates for its students when they take courses taught by other schools. Tying drop dates to classes, rather than to a student’s school affiliation, would place everyone on a level playing field and eliminate the inequities of staggered drop dates.