Junior Stella Schindler, a physics major, thought she was taking full advantage of Washington University’s class shopping period when she ran into a friend who quickly informed her that the add/drop deadline had come and gone.

“So I pull up WebSTAC, and I’m enrolled in one physics class, one math course and 14 credits of humanities,” Schindler said.

For many students, this would have been the end of the line, stuck in a set of courses they weren’t quite satisfied with for the next four months, but Schindler learned from her past experiences serving on Student Union Senate. Teaming up with senators Morgan Hartman and Elizabeth Smith, both sophomores, Schindler drafted an SU Senate resolution to restore the course shopping period to its former length of two full weeks and two days—last offered for the fall 2014 semester.

“For students who maybe decide after the first class, ‘This class isn’t really for me, I need to find another one,’ sometimes to make one change requires you to shuffle around your entire schedule to find different sections and different courses that work for you that you hadn’t planned on before,” Schindler said. “And to do that requires time, and if you have courses meeting only once a week or two times before the add/drop deadline, then that can be nearly impossible to do.”

The resolution passed in Senate unanimously and was sent on to the University Council, which includes the chancellor, provost, deans and others. Four deans, one from each of the undergraduate schools, are responsible for setting the add/drop deadlines, which are currently positioned at one week and two days after the first day of classes.

Dean Jen Smith of the College of Arts & Sciences said that she was willing to compromise, but emphasized that the initial reason for the change in 2015 came from worries about class productivity in the first weeks of classes.

“The dominant professor concerns—it’s the late add, it’s not the drops at all. It’s somebody adding on at the add deadline and they’d be showing up to class for the first time late in the third week of the semester, and that just is really disruptive,” Smith explained. “That student is really far behind, and with more and more of us following the educational psychology that you should test more frequently and with lesser stakes, many of us now have our first exams in the first week of class.”

She noted that the other schools had more specific concerns: For the art school, catching up with studio work even a week late could be difficult, and with the business school, Associate Dean Steve Malter wanted add/drop deadlines to be earlier so that professors could assign groups early on.

Associate Dean of Engineering Student Services Chris Kroeger noted similar concerns, such as group work and learning objectives being delayed until classes were solidified after the deadline.

“It really was delaying the time in which the real education part of the course was taking place, so it was making the first couple weeks a little bit worthless in terms of the content that was being covered,” Kroeger said.

Smith discussed possible other options, like changing deadlines by school instead of sticking to a universal undergraduate deadline, but admitted the idea could be complicated.

“We’ve tried to streamline and systematize as much as we could so that you wouldn’t run into that confusion but it’s hard enough to get people to know when the deadlines are even when there’s just one,” Smith said. “We understand and we do want people to have the opportunity to try out classes; we don’t want to completely get rid of that, and the only challenge with anything that’s regulatory is that it’s going to be probably absurdly complex.”

Kroeger, however, took a stauncher stance against this kind of modification.

“I think it would be a disaster if we had different deadlines [for each school],” Kroeger said. “What’s really the deadline attached to? Is it attached to the student? The school they’re from? Or is it attached to the course itself? There really has to be one set of deadlines for all undergraduates, otherwise it would be too confusing.”

Though unclear exactly how, Smith believes there is room for both sides to compromise.

“Is there a way we could work through something that would maybe not be what either of us wants but is it at least some component, something better than, something more in the middle than where we are now?” Smith said.