“Life’s a journey, not a destination,” says Dr. Michael Smutko, who teaches the popular science course Modern Cosmology. Smutko has seen a steady 10 percent drop rate in the class over the past five years. He is concerned that students sometimes have the wrong attitude about college, causing them to drop out of classes at the first hint of difficulty. “Being at a school like NU is a privilege that should be savored as much as possible,” he says. “It’s not about extra credit and strategizing the path of least resistance to graduation.”
But every quarter, students are still abuzz with the best stress strategy of all: dropping a class entirely. The number of drops processed on CAESAR between the add and drop deadline gives an estimate of how many students drop classes every quarter. In Fall Quarter of 2007, there were 228 instances of dropped classes, 59 percent of which were processed in the week before the last day to drop a class. The numbers increased to 319 last winter, 78 percent of which were processed in the last week, and decreased to 184 last spring, with 57 percent occurring in the last week. Evidently, students like to wait until the last moment to drop if they do decide to do so.
Weinberg sophomore Jason Catanese dropped Introduction to the Solar System on the drop deadline of Fall Quarter his freshman year, citing dissatisfaction with his grade as the major reason. “I was passing the class, but if I would’ve stayed with it, there was a chance I wouldn’t have passed, and it would’ve brought my GPA down,” Catanese said.
“Since then, I’ve grown and adapted to what college is like — I’ve learned that even if you think you are doing poorly in a class, if you go in and talk to your professor, and go to office hours, you can really improve your grade,” Catanese said. “I don’t see myself dropping any classes for the rest of my time here.”
If there’s no chance you can pass a class, dropping might be your best option, but first, “go in and talk to your professor,” Catanese recommended. Most professors are willing to help instead of telling you to drop the class.
Smutko said he feels no “schadenfreude” from the fact that people drop Cosmology. “I’ve just accepted that 1 out of 10 people will drop,” Smutko said.
But the reasons students have for dropping a class are sometimes questionable. “Students have all kinds of reasons for dropping classes, some of them good and some of them less so,” Philosophy Assistant Professor Kyla Ebels-Duggan said.
Ebels-Duggan taught a 200-level course called Classics of Ethical Theory last Spring, and saw the enrollment drop from 110 students to 100 students over the course of the quarter.
Students often seem to have an expectation that distribution classes should be graded easily and require little work, Ebels-Duggan said. “Some students have a legitimate interest in finding classes that will meet their distro requirements without demanding too much work, but I don’t pitch this class at those students,” Ebels-Duggan said. “I tell people up front that the class is demanding, not to scare them off, but to give them the information that they need to make a reasonable decision about whether the class is what they are looking for.”
Smutko has similar concerns. One of the most common reasons for dropping, he thinks, was the class being more difficult than anticipated — a pattern that worries him. “In the five years that I’ve been at NU,” he said, “I’ve found it troubling that more and more students are signing up for classes based largely on how easy they think that the classes will be. The only thing that seems to be important is a 4.0 at the end of four years so that they can get into the right med school, law school, or business school. Whether or not they learned anything along the way seems to be irrelevant.”
Perhaps Smutko is right — maybe the quarterly dropping frenzy is an indication of a larger problem. Are we really so focused on a string of letters on our transcripts that we are willing to just throw four weeks’ worth of work out the window? It can often seem like Northwestern, with its bounty of career-hungry Medill journalists and McCormick engineers, plus a slew of Weinberg students stuck in the rut of the pre-med route, is too pre-professional. People sometimes forget that we’re here to learn.
Dropping classes should be a last resort, not a quick fix to prevent a blemish on your transcript. The pass/no credit option is also available for most classes. Taking a class P/N can be very rewarding, relieving the stress of making the grade without sacrificing the learning experience. Jaci Rivera, the assistant registrar, hypothesized that “the significantly lower number of drops in the fall could indicate that the extra three months of registration over the summer allows students more opportunity to arrange their schedules, making dropping less necessary.”
So perhaps this quarter, put more thought into registration, and don’t expect all your distros to be easy next quarter. After all, “college is supposed to be about trying new things,” as Smutko said. “This includes failing sometimes, but becoming wiser—not just smarter—in the process.”