Drop Class Deadline Drop Deadlines

Drop Class Deadline

Drop deadlines exist for a number of reasons. For the student, the drop deadline helps to ensure that students are proactive in setting their schedules and ensuring that the courses they are taking fit their needs. Most drop deadlines are early in the semester, compelling students to make decisions about their participation in a course early on. However, there are sometimes drop deadlines later in the semester to give students some flexibility should issues arise in a course mid-stream. Students have the opportunity to drop courses if they so desire, as completion of a course with a poor grade is something that will appear on the student's transcript and be calculated in the student's GPA.

For the school, drop deadlines exist to help instructors and administrators manage the program effectively. The earlier that enrollment numbers in a course are set, the earlier that schools can make effective determinations regarding the allocation of resources, and instructors can manage the course schedule. There may be cases early in the semester when a course is fully-subscribed, so if students wishing to do so drop the course early another student may have the opportunity to sign onto the class. In addition, the school seeks to promote the idea of student responsibility. Once the semester has progressed to a certain point, the student cannot drop the class and instead is encouraged to work with the instructor to find ways to boost the student's performance.

From the school's perspective, there are a few reasons why students should be held to these deadlines. School administrators, for example, have to process drops and after a certain point in the semester need to concentrate on other tasks. It is a drain on scarce resources to process drops throughout the entire semester. In addition, the promotion of student responsibility is important for the school -- it is a valuable part of the education process to work through problems once a commitment has been made by the student. In addition, allowing drops late in the semester allows students to skirt responsibility by exiting classes that they find themselves doing poorly in. The student should not be given a free pass to attend any class and then drop the class late in the semester just because he/she is doing poorly.

One way to improve the system is to set the last drop date after the first mid-term, or to provide grade feedback at some point before the last drop date. This gives the students the opportunity to gauge their progress before it is too late to drop. This avoids putting the students in an awkward position. An alternate situation would be allowing students to have one late drop in their careers, giving the students a one-time out should they feel that they require it. This scenario would at least prevent a rush of late drops that would tie up valuable administrative resources.

The school can also work to ensure that the drop process is not disruptive to its staff, or to classroom dynamics. Nobody wants to cause a disruption to the normal flow of education, but a student's education is something that he/she wants to have control over. If disruption to the system was minimal, later drops could be more allowable.