Drop rate rampant across campus

Eight o’clock in the morning, students throughout campus are poised tensely at their computers, CRN’s ready to go and trigger-happy fingers on the keyboard, hoping to be faster than all other students who need their same classes.

Registration ends, classes are full and stress levels begin to rise among students as they commence to wonder how they will be able to get the class that they need.

The semester begins. Three days of Add/Drop keep students running to a computer, logging into the GC&SU PAWS Web site and checking it religiously, hoping for a newly opened spot in a class.

All too often, one never does. The class a student so desperately needs as a prerequisite to stay on track, to be eligible to apply to their major or to graduate on time remains full.

Students would be even more upset to know that six weeks later, too late for anyone’s benefit, two students drop that same class, and two chairs remain empty for the remainder of the semester.

They drop for their own reasons. Sometimes students have a failing grade, are too busy or have a family or medical emergency. Sometimes they are just too lazy.

Whatever the reasons or justifications students at GC&SU have for dropping classes, the fact remains that it is an ever-growing trend, which has turned into what some have coined as a “drop culture” among the student body.

“There seems to be a widespread acceptance of signing up for a certain number of credit hours and then planning to drop, or at least planning that you would be able to drop down and still maintain full-time status,” said Dr. Beth Rushing, dean of the School of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

According to a study of GC&SU sophomores, students drop an average of three credit hours per semester during their first two years. This equates to 12 hours of total credits dropped, the equivalent of one full-time semester.

To clarify, “dropping” means receiving a W grade, or withdrawing from a class after the initial three-day Add/Drop period. Classes dropped within the Add/Drop period at the beginning of a semester are not considered attempted hours and are therefore removed from a student’s transcript.

While W’s remain permanently on a students transcript, that does not seem to dissuade students from withdrawing. Several years ago, one report showed that 11 percent of core curriculum grades given at GC&SU were W’s, said Rushing.

Many students and faculty agree that the state funded HOPE scholarship is a large contributor to the motivation for dropping, since students must maintain at least a 3.0 GPA to keep the scholarship.

“I think a big chunk of it is to manage the Hope scholarship. What I don’t know is whether we see more withdrawing from a class among students who have HOPE and are trying to make sure they maintain (it), and that’s somewhat understandable, but it still creates a problem,” Rushing said. “At the same time, many upper-class students don’t have Hope scholarship and are still having the same pattern, and it’s almost as if ‘well when it gets hard, I’ll just drop it’ instead of just trying to push through.”

Dr. Lila Roberts, chair of the GC&SU Mathematics Department, agrees that many students take a similar attitude towards math classes.

“There is really no reason that every student who can be accepted to GC&SU can’t pass that math modeling course,” Roberts said. “Everybody who comes through a high school college prep program has the background to pass math modeling, whether you’re good at math or not.”

Roberts, along with Rushing and other GC&SU faculty and staff, support the possibility of a university policy that limits the number of hours a student could drop during their time at GC&SU.

“I think we as an institution make it too easy for students to drop, and I personally would like to see a plan in place that limits the number of times a student can drop a course,” Roberts said. “I think we can do more as an institution to encourage students to stick it out.”

GC&SU senior Martin Wattenbarger believes that a limited drop policy might attract a better student body.

“I think the result would be that most serious students wouldn’t care because it wouldn’t be an issue for them,” Wattenbarger said. “The lazier students, whose goal is just to drag four years into as many possible, would hate it and think it’s unfair.”

“Drop culture” is hardly a problem unique to the GC&SU campus. According to a Board of Regents study on DFW rates, or the number of times a D, F, or W grade is recorded on student transcripts, some courses system-wide have a DFW rate as high as 60 percent. In other words, 60 percent of the grades recorded for that course are D’s, F’s, or W’s.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Oct 14 2005. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry