The Committee on Instruction's new course-drop proposal is a step in the right direction towards greater academic freedom for Dartmouth students.
The proposal, to allow students to drop courses without professors' permission until two weeks before the end of each term, gives students greater freedom to judge for themselves whether or not they want to stay in a course. If professors could no longer withhold permission and force students to stay, students no longer have to fear being trapped in a course simply because the first ten days have passed. As COI Chair Gary Johnson told The Dartmouth, the proposal puts the decision whether to drop a course "back into the student's lap," where it rightfully belongs.
The proposed policy would eliminate a lot of unnecessary hassles for everyone involved in the drop process. Students wouldn't have to petition or convince professors to let them drop, professors wouldn't have to try to dissuade students from dropping or make the decision whether to grant permission and administrators wouldn't have to deal with the extra paperwork.
In addition, the old policy of requiring students to get approval for late drops is arbitrary, unproductive, and unnecessary. Most other colleges don't require such permission; they all recognize that students are mature enough to make their own decisions.
And the ten-day limit is arbitrarily short. Because of the D-Plan, Dartmouth's academic terms are very short, which makes an extended course "shopping period" impractical. As a result, students have very little knowledge about their courses by the time they must establish their final schedule.
They have to sign up for courses months in advance based on the Elective Circular, which gives no actual information about the courses, just the times offered, and the ORC, which gives only brief descriptions of each course. Unless students have taken the time to snoop around department offices beforehand, they often don't even know who their professors will be until the new term begins.
During the first few class meetings, the work begins, but is often deceptively easy at first. Especially in math and science courses, the first few classes are often intended as a review and/or introduction to the material, and thus the workload is easier at first than it will be later on in the term.
It is often not until the third week of a term that students have a good idea of what a course is going to be like. By then, under the current policy they would already need permission to drop the course -- as if dropping a course in the third week were so complicated a decision that students couldn't make it on their own.
It isn't and shouldn't be treated as one. Dropping a course in the third week is little different from dropping in the second. In any case, dropping a course later on is a personal decision and should be left to the student, who as a mature adult should understand the consequences and the benefits of doing so.
Not only are we forbidden to carry a two-course load more than three times in our Dartmouth careers, but repeatedly dropping courses wreaks havoc on major and other graduation requirements, looks bad on the transcript and is a waste of money.
Even if Dartmouth students were unscrupulous GPA-freaks, these consequences and restrictions will ensure that dropping courses will never be taken lightly will continue only to be used in extreme cases. Students still won't be able to repeatedly and wantonly drop classes just "because of bad mid-term grades," contrary to the fears of the D's Editorial Board ("COI Proposal Is Too Lenient," Jan. 31).
The COI proposal will have no effect on students who work hard and are in courses they are familiar with and prepared for. Except in cases of illness or personal problems, these students rarely drop courses anyway, and this proposal won't change that. Nor will it alter the incentives to stay in a course; the unaesthetically-pleasing "W" will still appear on the transcript.
But for students who find themselves in a course for which they are grossly unprepared and for which dropping is absolutely necessary, the proposal would remove unnecessary obstacles in the path of what is and should ultimately be their own decision. The COI has made a good proposal that will help streamline the process, without doing anything to encourage more dropping.