Georgetown’s add/drop period is speed dating: you are given a brief encounter and forced to rate it either yea or nay. Yet yeas and nays have more important implications when you’re rating classes and not a potential one night stand.
“It’s so short, it makes it difficult to properly choose classes,” Alexander Kolodin (SFS ’09) said of the University’s add/drop policies.
Georgetown students must finalize their schedules after only seven days of classes. Nearby schools have longer add/drop periods; American University, which began classes two days before Georgetown, concluded their period three days later for a total of ten days.
“For juniors and especially seniors, most of the classes we have to take meet a few times a week,” Ted Visser (SFS ’08) said. “Most of my classes had only one meeting by the end of add/drop. With the first meeting, the professor talks about administrative issues. We don’t know what class with that professor is like if you only have one meeting.”
Assistant Dean Tad Howard said in an e-mail that the deans are flexible with add/drop for classes that meet only once a week. He went on to say that students that come by the dean’s office following the second class meeting will often be accommodated. In fairness, add/drop for classes that meet only on Mondays are extended until after the second class meeting.
Often, though, students do not have time to go to the dean’s office following add/drop for schedule changes. Those extra days that are currently afforded to classes that meet only on Mondays could easily be extended to classes that meet only on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, which currently meet only once before the end of add/drop, ensuring that every class would have met twice before the end of the period.
Lengthening add/drop will also spread the dean’s workload. Kolodin said that the deans, while helpful, are hard to meet with during the period. “I tried to schedule a meeting with them a week before add/drop ended, and all the slots were already full.”
The processing of an independent tutorial, in which a student meets individually with a professor, also concerned Kolodin. He said that it did not make it through the system and onto his schedule until after the add/drop period.
“I had to drop a class at the risk of not having a full schedule due to the long processing,” he said.
Add/drop is too short to be completely effective. Lengthening add/drop by a few days would alleviate many students’ worries about whether or not they are taking the right classes. Most of us are indeed settled after two weeks of classes, but having the third week option available would allow us to be completely sure that we are where we need to be.
