A few days ago I asked people’s opinions regarding drop deadlines for students who decide they no longer want to be in a class. As usual, I forgot a few qualifiers, and nobody used the categories I gave, but after sorting the answers into roughly the categories I gave, here are the results:
A drop deadline four weeks into the ten-week term is the clear favorite, with just over half of the votes (I eliminated one “students should never be allowed to drop, ever,” which would’ve made it exactly half). How does this map onto what we actually do?
Amusingly, our actual drop deadline is in the gap at 8 weeks, which nobody liked. To clarify a bit, this is the deadline for students to drop a course with no real need to give a reason, and get a grade of “W” on the transcript. After the end of the eighth week, students need to get permission from one of the Deans to drop, and the grade is recorded as “WP” or “WF” depending on whether they were passing or failing at the time.
There’s an earlier deadline, at the end of the second week, for dropping a course and not having it show up on the transcript at all. None of these methods provide any tuition remission, as we operate on a “comprehensive fee” system, where students pay the same tuition no matter how many (or how few) classes they take.
Eight weeks seems excessive to me. It’s also sort of silly for most students to drop at that time– by the time you’re eight weeks into the term, you’ve completed enough of the work that you might as well just stick it out for two more weeks, and get full credit for the class. I don’t believe I’ve ever given an “F” to a student who stuck the class out to the end, handed in all the major assignments, and took the exams– a couple of D’s, sure, but if students put in the work, they’ll get a passing grade, and be able to count the course for credit.
I’m also not wild about the fact that the students don’t have to talk to the professor teaching the class before dropping it. The first I usually hear of a student dropping a class is the note from the Registrar informing me that they’ve been dropped. Most of the students who drop this way are looking at a grade in the “C” range, but have convinced themselves that they’re failing. If they met with me, I’d be able to correct that impression, and advise them to stay.
I can see the argument for not requiring faculty to sign off on a drop, though– if there’s a sufficiently bad personality conflict, or something creepy going on, you don’t want to force students to talk to the faculty member who’s the source of the problem. Still, it’s be nice to get a little more notice.
The other thing about this that I think causes a few problems is that it contributes to “grade inflation.” A couple of years after the 8-week drop policy went into effect, a colleague in another department created a bit of a stir by pointing out that the average GPA had jumped up, and that the fraction of A and B grades had increased, which he felt indicated slipping standards. That’s exactly what you expect if you start allowing later drops, though– the students who are getting A’s and B’s don’t drop, but the students who are getting D’s do.
If you set up a toy model of a normal-ish distribution, with a class of 30 students, 5 getting A’s, 10 B’s, 10 C’s, and 5 D’s, the average GPA for the class is 2.67, a B-, and A’s account for 16.7% of the grades. If you allow the D students to drop, the class average is now a 2.80, and A’s are 20% of the grades. This looks like grade inflation, but it’s really just evaporative cooling– you’ve taken out the students at one extreme, so the average shifts toward the other extreme.
Anyway, those are the results of the totally scientific study we did on Monday. Thoughts, comments, requests to change you answer?