The Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate and the Education Policy Committee (EPC) have worked to enact a new policy that would give students additional time to decide whether to drop a class without record of enrollment. Finalized earlier this month, the change will take effect next semester.
The new deadline to drop a class will be during the fifth week of classes. Previously, it had been during the fourth week. An identical extension will apply to students who decide that they want to take a class pass/fail.
Dean of Undergraduate Education James Glaser said that the EPC, which is comprised of administrators and faculty members, voted to recommend the change to him and to the registrar. "In response, the registrar will make this change for next semester," he said in an e-mail.
The push to move the deadline back began earlier in the semester when the Senate passed a resolution supporting the extension. On Feb. 27, the EPC also voted to accept a proposal to extend the deadline, although it only passed by a narrow margin. Although the EPC's decision was final, it was not technically approved by the Office of the Registrar until earlier this month.
One concern shared by some members of the EPC who voted against the proposal to extend the deadline is that it would ultimately have a bad impact on students.
"My feeling is that the longer students stay in a course that is going badly, the more their other courses and grades suffer," Associate Professor of Computer Science and committee member Alva Couch said in an e-mail. "It is better to make the decision and be done with it than to drag things out over a long time period."
According to TCU Senator Amanda Richardson, who chairs the Senate's Education Committee and serves as a student representative on the EPC, critics also claimed that the later deadline would better enable students to "shop for grades" by sifting through classes to find easiest ones available.
Couch, although opposed to a later deadline, said fears of grade shopping are mostly groundless. "It is possible that students utilize a later [drop date] to 'shop for grades,' but in my experience, that behavior is extremely rare," he said.
Despite the criticisms, Richardson is confident that the extension will benefit students.
"The early timing of the drop date has always been a great concern for the student body," she said. "Generally, students have no way to measure their progress in a course by the fourth week of classes, so a later drop date would directly address their concerns."
Affording students this liberty to self-evaluate outweighs concerns about the possibility of grade-oriented class selection, Richardson said.
While students may end up shopping for grades in some instances, they "should be able to choose their participation in a course with as much information as possible, specifically regarding their understanding of the course material," Richardson said.
