<p>Hey guys, I read in the Tech that the admin recommended moving the drop date forward to 5 weeks from 9 weeks in order to generate revenue. </p>
<p>I don’t think 5 weeks is long enough to assess whether you are doing ok in a class, and so I think this is going to increase the stress of the student body. If you guys care, you should let admin know that you oppose it.</p>
<p>This is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. Our 9 week drop date has saved lives at MIT, and this is no understatement.</p>
<p>I’m writing to the Tech.</p>
<p>Why the change?</p>
<p>Sorry for this question but: What’s a ‘drop date’? :-)</p>
<p>Drop Date is the final date that you can drop a course without it appearing on your transcript.</p>
<p>I know that the EC president-elect and EC senator have made making sure this doesn’t happen one of their top priorities for this coming year (along with keeping 4-year housing, not having mandatory dining, and not dissolving S^3).</p>
<p>The admins suggest a lot of things, and there has been a significant amount of outrage about moving drop date. I’d be very surprised if this actually happened.</p>
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<p>They said something about revenue being lost from class resources spent on people dropping classes. It’s in the Tech article. Their other revenue-saving idea is to start handing out long-distance MIT degrees for OpenCourseware; I love OpenCourseware, but this is a bad idea too. However, they seem to be more high on the idea of changing drop date. It looks like it’ll happen unless there is strong opposition to it; it was one of their top recommendations of the task force.</p>
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<p>I know. Frankly, sometimes I’m stunned at how out-of-touch the admin is that they would make this recommendation.</p>
<p>^The out-of-touchness of the administration never ceases to amaze me.</p>
<p>I hope everybody will really get in gear and fight this. It’s insane.</p>
<p>I don’t really see how moving Drop Date back will cut costs. I understand the general idea, that resources are wasted on people who don’t actually finish the class…but really, how much? The professor makes the same amount, whether there are 10 or 500 students in lecture. Do enough students eventually drop that might justify an actual reduction in the number of sections? For 2.005, maybe. (And a few others, I just named the example I’m familiar with.) But for most classes? The only time this might represent a any sort of savings might be in lab classes that use consumable materials. All the lab equipment is already there, the tests and psets must be written…very little of the cost of any class should change substantially with enrollment, unless I’m missing something. </p>
<p>I just fail to see how this is one of their top recommendations (even apart from not liking it personally). I’d love to see any calculations behind this. Although I suppose an MIT Task Force would approach the question quite differently than MIT students, which is the real shame.</p>
<p>I’ve been in sections where, after add date, there were only 3 people in the section, and they still didn’t cut it. So saying that they’d save costs by cutting sections doesn’t really make sense given that they don’t CURRENTLY do that for sparsely populated recitations, even when they can…</p>
<p>@LauraN I think the costs are TAs mostly.</p>
<p>I talked to someone in the admin who told me that they would never change it because the outrage would be too great and they never seriously considered it (along with some more items from the report, like no 4 year housing)</p>
<p>^They could always cut pay for TAs, like Harvard has done.</p>