The pain of withdrawing from a class

I am suffering from withdrawal symptoms. Every time I see President George W. Bush's middle initial, I get queasy, and not for the typical reasons. Typing the "www" in an Internet address triples the shivers down my spine. And staring at my transcript, with a big W nestled between two of the first letters of the alphabet, makes me want to curl up in the fetal position, eat my bonbons and repeatedly watch Beaches on the Oxygen network.

Sadly, the magical time of making bad grades go away disappears in a puff of smoke after a few weeks into each semester. After that, we're left to carefully doggy paddle on our own in the shark tank of academia. Withdrawing, though, is like throwing the shark a femur, in the hopes that it won't entirely devour the rest of your trembling carcass. Everyone knows that by Withdrawing, you're really saying, "I screwed this up beyond a reasonable doubt -- and not early enough to realize it. Please don't destroy my hovering-around-dean's-list GPA."

Withdrawing from a course after the add/drop period is generally unwise, according to the legions of academic advisors huddling in College Hall. "Don't do it," they chant in unison, smacking their lips in anticipation of certain demise. "Law School, Med School, the School of Rock -- they all know the W is a Warning sign, a sign of Weakness."

Had I known that econ and I were not meant to be pals, laughing at supply and demand curves together until our sides ached, I would not even have ventured near the massive lecture hall in the basement of Logan. Truthfully, for the first few weeks of the class, I thought I was doing splendidly. I studied nightly, filled out practice tests and even tittered in class at the professor's slides. I envisioned perhaps shaping Economics into a major to complement English lit. Maybe a little career in investment banking on the side.

And then came the first midterm. By the time I got my grade and realized I was more suited to non-numerical pursuits, it was too late to do anything about the class except Withdraw and Wallow in my own self-pity. Why, you ask, am I so dense? Why couldn't I have figured this out sooner in the semester? Not one evaluation was given to the class until after that magical drop deadline had already passed.

If I had received an assessment in "Introductory Economics: Micro" during the first few weeks of the semester, I would have been able to change my grading to pass/fail or drop the class entirely. With only two midterms and a final counting as the entire grade in most large lecture classes, as well as most other science and engineering classes, students should have a general sense of their ability to do well by the end of the drop period.

Therefore, the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education should petition the faculty for a mandatory graded assessment before the add/drop period ends -- a quiz, a test or any small review to give undergraduate students some idea of their ability to grasp the material within the first five weeks. Five weeks is ample amount of time for instructors to create a small graded evaluation. In doing so, students would accurately be able to judge their ability to stick with the course.

If the faculty argue that learning is not just about grades and students should not drop a class based on unsatisfactory marks, then it would be easy enough to extend the pass/fail deadline past the drop deadline, to de-emphasize grades and facilitate the learning process. As much as we all love learning for the sake of learning, we don't really want to fail a large introductory class taken to broaden our liberal arts education. Changing a grade to pass/fail does not undermine the learning process. In fact, it indicates a willingness on the part of the student to learn without the restrictions of worrying about a grade. If students cannot drop a class before having a graded assessment, then they should at least have the right to receive an assessment before deciding what type of grading they would like to have in the course.

Unfortunately, the W on my transcript will remain for all eternity, smack dab between my letter grades in Yiddish and Spanish. And maybe I'm not the best person to consult for what happens when a supply curve shifts out or up or swishes back and forth across some imaginary line. Cross elasticity? Not a clue. But I'm damn good at Monopoly. And that's not gonna change.

Melody Joy Kramer is a junior English major from Cherry Hill, N.J. Perpendicular Harmony appears on Wednesdays.

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