After completing a 10-page report on student concerns surrounding the add/drop deadline, Student Union’s academic affairs committee held a meeting Nov. 5 to discuss the impacts of a potential deadline extension.

Considerations for extension within the report include the time necessary to make informed schedule decisions and accessibility of class exploration. In writing the report, committee senators referenced concerns expressed by students regarding the deadline in Student Union’s annual Improve WashU Campaign survey.

Sophomore Anne He, Academic Affairs Committee chair, pointed out how under the current add/drop deadline, students are able to attend fewer Monday-Wednesday classes than Tuesday-Thursday classes before deciding whether to add or drop a class. This discrepancy occurs because students always miss a Monday class before the deadline each semester, due to either Labor Day or Martin Luther King Jr. day.

“What we want to do is move the add/drop deadline to the following Monday, which doesn’t sound like a lot. That’s only adding four calendar days, [or] two days where school is in session. You get the extra Friday, the extra Monday, and then the weekend,” He said. “That’s our ideal goal.”

The Academic Affairs Committee passed their report along to Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences Jennifer Smith, McKelvey School of Engineering Associate Dean for Students Chris Kroeger, Olin School of Business Senior Associate Dean of Undergraduate & Graduate Programs Steve Malter and Sam Fox School Associate Dean of Students Georgia Binnington before meeting to discuss potential changes.

Sophomore Elodie Rebesque supports SU’s goal for an extended add/drop deadline, but would prefer for students to get even more time.

“I think it’s really bold to think that we have our lives together at that point. After our first exam [in each class], that’s a pretty crucial point when we realize whether or not we can keep up with the course load,” Rebesque said. “You don’t know your full course load until maybe two months in, and if you can or cannot handle it. The add/drop deadline is so early that it’s not that helpful, and it just adds a lot of stress.”

Conversations during the meeting emphasized the fast-paced nature of many classes and the strain that would be placed upon both faculty and students by an extended “add” portion of the deadline.

“Every class period a student misses, they fall further and further behind. That can be less than beneficial to them,” Kroeger said. “With group work, a lot of faculty will have small groups assigned to accomplish some kind of project in a class, so having those groups assigned early on so that students can begin work early on is an advantage to everyone.”

SU’s report emphasized that Washington University had the second shortest add/drop deadline of any listed institution when compared with peer institutions including Duke University, Princeton University, Vanderbilt University, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, Harvard University, Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Only Emory University, with six academic days until the add/drop deadline, had a shorter time span than the University’s eight academic days until the add/drop deadline.

“One thing that Wash. U. prioritizes a lot is [seeing] what our peer institutions are doing. We counted the number of days that private, semester-based institutions like ours in the top 20 have to decide before their add-drop deadline,” He said. “A lot of these institutions have such varied, nuanced policies, so many of them have an earlier add deadline than a drop deadline. Some of them have policies where you can pay to extend after the deadline.”

Kroeger referenced earlier deadline-altering precedents that took time to deliberate.

“A few years ago, we did change the pass/fail deadline to be later in the semester … to be November 15,” Kroeger said. “Before, it was just a few weeks into the semester, and we made that later.”

Following the meeting, all parties agreed that additional input from each division’s faculty would be necessary before any definitive action could be taken.