In order to graduate you have to make a lot of hard decisions, so how quickly can you make them? How long would it take you to account for every little factor to make a choice which could disrupt your overall academic plan? You get into a class for the first day and you go over the syllabus— not too bad. However, you quickly begin to find over the course of the week that this class, or professor, is not what you expected it to be. You cannot afford to waste the time slot, money or effort on passing this wildcard of a class when it is not even a requirement for your major. So, you dive back into the system, back to the schedule builder. How long does it take you to fight through the shifting sands of class registration to find something better suited to your ladder?
If it takes you more than a week, then according to Mississippi State University’s academic calendar you failed to make the deadline. Withdrawing from a class after the add/drop period leaves a permanent mark on your transcript for academic advisors or graduate school admissions workers to see— all because you were asked to make this kind of choice before things have truly had a chance to settle. This is the kind of decision that takes time to make in a way that does not pull a keystone Jenga block from an already precariously-tilted tower of homework, classwork, job, sleep, food and health. While adding and dropping classes with no consequences all semester would be chaos, by the time that deadline slips past most classes have yet to gear up fully. Some have not even moved past their syllabus review phase. A week does not provide enough information or time to make a decision about something as important as this. Why should it stay this way instead of being replaced by a timeline which makes more sense and helps students make better choices for their future?
Psychology Today‘s article on decision making reveals that when people are put into an unfamiliar situation, they need to take longer to make a decision. Decisions made in a longer span tend to be better, since the extra time is used to dampen down the panicked first thoughts of “something is horribly wrong, get me out of here now,” and instead allows the decision maker to come up with an accurate assessment of the situation. On top of that, a stress study reported by the U.S. National Library of Medicine explores the connection of stress and general cognitive functions and found the execution of tasks becomes more difficult when participants are in the presence of a stressor, so there is no doubt students feel these same effects.
Overloads of stress, such as having to rebalance an entire semester’s schedule before things settle into a routine, are made all the worse by what can be called “noise.” “Noise” is any distraction or concern which detracts from the decisive ability of the person. Dr. Imran Syed with Geo News writes that the most common reactions to extreme levels of stress are a narrowed attention span and increased distractibility, compounding the issues with the effects of noise. How can we expect college students to make sound decisions when they do not have a level head?
The expansion of the time window to add and drop without a permanent “W” on your transcript, or to add and drop at all, would help take a load off the average student’s back. It would reduce the crunch time at the start of a semester. While there would have to be a way to make up the work in those situations, it would not be too difficult to adapt given the current climate. The pandemic has increased the number of recorded lectures for normal classes to aid in students not falling behind from unpredictable life events. By continuing this trend, it would allow flexibility for students to not miss lectures even if they add later than normal.