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06 October 2011

Dropping the Ball--and Courses, Too

I've got a serious beef here at Georgia College with one of our academic policies. Students are allowed to drop classes a full week after the midterm point. In practice, students use this as a fail-safe; if they are not doing well in a course, they simply drop it. I'm not sure why the policy is as such. It seems obvious that it is perverse. We are essentially encouraging irresponsibility and grade inflation. In the professional world, our graduates don't get a do-over button. If a project is off to a bad start, they'll need to summon the skills to salvage it, but they won't learn that valuable skill here. Instead, they're learning expediency.

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UPDATE: I just learned a new term for this practice: punting.

1 comment:

  1. That's nothing! Our students can withdraw up to November 4 (three weeks after mid terms) and, with an instructor's discretion, can withdraw as late as November 18. I think this increases grade inflation particularly in new classes where the instructor needs to maintain enrollment in order to justify teaching the class again. A colleague saw his enrollment go from 15 to 9 after the first assignment was graded.

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