This week, the College decided to push back its course drop deadline from Sept. 4 to 5 p.m. today. University officials made the call after many students experienced confusion with how class waitlisting on the new Student Information System works. The move means that the College's add and drop deadlines will now occur simultaneously.
SIS is still in its first year, and logistical issues are bound to arise from time to time. The College was right to push back the drop date and give students the opportunity to correct their enrollment statuses. But what exactly went wrong, and how can the problem best be addressed? How much of the issue should be attributed to simple "misunderstanding," and how much to a poor policy decision?
A technical error was not responsible for the confusion. Richard Handler, associate dean of academic programs, said, "SIS actually worked the way it was supposed to work, but there were consequences that complicated students' ability to drop courses without finding a W on their transcript." Students did not realize that SIS, unlike its predecessor ISIS, automatically adds waitlisted courses to students' schedules once spots become open. As long as students remain on waitlists, they run the risk of being added at anytime.
This feature became extremely problematic once Sept. 4 passed. If a student was automatically added to a class, there was no way to drop any course - neither the one added nor another class to exchange it with - without receiving a permanent "W" on the student's transcript. This problem was foreseeable. Though it is students' responsibility to learn the new system, needless misunderstanding should be avoided. At the very least, this waitlist feature should have been better communicated to students before the Sept. 4 deadline. Moreover, this issue underscores bigger flaws in the policy.
Having the drop date precede the add deadline creates dilemmas. The College's logic in doing things this way is understandable: it minimizes excessive class-swapping this far into the semester and, in theory, should open up class spots for students who still have less than their desired number of credits. Still, one can only assume that students on waitlists are currently enrolled in different "back up" courses. To do otherwise would be foolish in most instances. Precious few students are therefore able to enroll in waitlisted classes between the drop and add dates - at least without taking on heavier courseloads or accepting a loathsome "W" on their transcripts. The inconsistency in the add and drop dates appears to create more problems than it solves.
There are two obvious solutions to this year's complications. The first is simply to make the add and drop deadlines the same in future terms. Regardless, the waitlist on SIS should be reconfigured. Before the drop deadline, there is no problem with the system automatically adding students to classes, so long as they are sent e-mail notifications of the fact. After the drop date, however, students should instead be sent a notification that they are eligible to enroll in a class. Upon receiving the e-mail, students can be given 24 hours to accept or decline the invitation. Many headaches would be avoided this way for both students and the University registrar.
New projects like SIS require an adjustment period, but this was not an error in the site's functionality. The fault cannot entirely be placed upon students' reluctance to educate themselves about SIS, however, and so the University must recognize that this problem will not resolve itself. Action is needed to avoid similar confusion down the road.
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