Freshmen will face new shortened drop deadline on Tuesday

CORRECTION:  A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the deadline to drop a class. Freshmen have until Tuesday to reduce their course load. The story has been updated to reflect this change. The Daily Tar Heel apologizes for this error.

Freshmen who are still figuring out their schedules for the semester will have only until Tuesday to do so.

The class of 2018 was given just a 10-day period to drop classes, compared to the eight-week period that all older classes have.

The new policy gives freshmen until the fifth school day of the semester to add classes online and until the 10th day to drop classes. Any classes dropped after this period will show up as a withdrawal on students’ transcripts.

Freshman Lin Cao said new students in particular should have time to adjust their schedules.

“I feel like, if anything, freshmen need the longest time to figure out how a class works or how they’ll do in it,” she said.

In April 2013, the Board of Governors passed the 10-day policy, which applies to all UNC-system schools and will remain in place until the system determines that it should be changed.

In January, UNC’s Faculty Council approved a resolution  to exempt students on track to graduate before 2018.

The decision resulted from a petition started by then-Student Body President Christy Lambden, which gained more than 9,000 signatures from students, faculty and alumni.

UNC decided to enact the new policy gradually. Only the class of 2018 and subsequent classes will need to adhere to the new policy. All other classes will follow the old one, which means they have eight weeks to drop a class.

The new policy has drawn mixed reviews from both freshmen and upperclassmen.

Junior Raymond Blackwell said the period doesn’t provide enough time for students to evaluate their classes.

“I think this new policy is really unfair,” Blackwell said. “You can’t get a sense of how the class is going to be in just 10 days.”

Freshman Nguyen Le was upset that the policy singled out her class.

“It just seems like if they were going to implement a new drop-add policy, it should apply to everyone and not just freshmen,” she said.

Spencer Beck said even though he’s a freshman, the policy wouldn’t be problematic for him.

“I didn’t really intend on dropping any classes in the first place,” Beck said.

Roberta Norwood, associate university registrar, said UNC has not observed significant changes in the number of drop transactions this year compared to previous years.

“We are still in the process of analyzing the drop data. There are a lot of adds and drops going on this time of year,” Norwood said.

“There is always a lot of add-drop activity leading up to the start of the term and continuing through the fifth day for adds and then end of the 10th day for drops.”

Freshman Nathan Kwon said the policy eliminates the need for stressful decisions later in the semester.

“In some ways, it can be good because after the drop deadline passes, you don’t have to worry about whether you have to drop the course or not,” he said.

“If you’re six weeks into a course, you have to decide whether it’s worth dropping it after putting six weeks of work into it.”

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