The Ins and Outs of How to Handle Class Registration, Add/Drop, and Withdrawal
By Ed Walters ’08
The Office of the Registrar can be your worst enemy or your best friend. It really depends on how you treat it. The Registrar processes registration requests, schedules classes, maintains class lists, enforces the rules for entering or leaving classes, and keeps a permanent record of grades and other marks, both positive and negative.
In short, the Registrar is God. And you really don’t want God on your bad side.
This Office will either destroy you or save you, depending on how intelligently and diligently you use it. So listen up.
Initial course registration is important. This is done online. Sign up for the classes you want as soon as you can, because many close very quickly. However, if a course is closed by the time you register, don’t fret. Pick another course just in case, but also sit in on the closed course’s first day of class and participate. A lot. Wow and woo the professor. Nine times out of ten, they’ll let you enroll. If that happens, you can then simply drop the “just in case” course and happily walk away with the course you wanted. But make sure you drop the unwanted course. It won’t just disappear. If you aren’t careful, it will creep back sometime near the end of the semester and rip out your throat, chortling the entire time.
Booyah. This brings us to “Add/Drop” week.
The first week of classes, you can add or drop courses with abandon. It’s basically a week of course shopping. So add or drop away, but always keep in mind these important deadlines:
You have one week after the first day that classes begin to “drop” a course with no vestige of it being left on your permanent academic record, the one that’s sent to graduate schools and employers. Do this online.
You have two weeks after the add/drop week is over, otherwise known as the third week after the first day of classes begin, to “withdraw” from a course. This will leave a permanent “W” on your transcript, and while a few of these aren’t necessarily bad or punitive, they may raise some eyebrows if there are more than a few. You can attempt to do this online. If this attempt fails, go to the registrar and fill out a form. This is absolutely necessary.
But whatever you do, CHECK TCONLINE AND BLACKBOARD AFTER YOU HAVE DROPPED OR WITHDRAWN FROM A CLASS. Email your adviser and inform them of your actions and email the registrar and inform them. Establish a paper trail and a historical record of your drop or withdrawal. The reasons for these actions will be explained soon enough. For now, however, consider it absolutely necessary.
I served on the Academic Affairs Committee last year, a committee of faculty members and students that deal with issues of academic dishonesty, credit allocation, grading, and even expulsion. If you’re doing poorly in school, this is the committee you report to. If you’re doing well, this is the committee that awards you distinctions like “faculty honors” and all the rest.
Many students come before the committee with a desire to add or drop a class, usually well into the semester. Oftentimes, the reason is a bad grade in the class. Of course, at times, it’s not. Either way, I’m about to let you in on a secret.
Most students that stand in front of the committee have their appeals rejected. And most of the time, it’s because they didn’t exercise the necessary policy of CYA, otherwise known as “cover your ass.”
Unlike the American court system in which you’re presumed innocent until proven guilty, here at Trinity, you’re presumed guilty and stupid until proven otherwise.
There are two main ways to avoid trouble or reach a favorable agreement with the Academic Affairs Committee. A medical reason or an administrative error. Bad grades are never an excuse, and in most cases, neither is negligence. This is college, people. We’re expected to behave like adults, and like adults, we’re expected to take care of our own messes.
So generally, if you don’t have a medical reason to add, drop, or withdraw from a class, supported by a physician, the only way to get your way is to provide a paper trail that supports your claims of innocence. This paper trail needs to be composed of date-stamped emails between you, your professors, and your adviser, and additionally, the records in the Office of the Registrar.
It seems pedantic, but in many ways, it’s a lifelong lesson. Cover your ass. That’s why we cite sources in papers and why we keep receipts for tax-returns. Documentation, even if it’s simply a documentation of your flawed attempt to drop a class (and they can check to see if you attempted it, too), proves that you operated in good faith and within the boundaries of the college system. And most of the time, that’s all it takes to get your way.
The most important thing to learn from this is that these rules about course registration, add/drop and withdrawal are firmly set in the venerable mahogany of our institution. If you pretend as though they don’t exist, or pretend that you can talk your way out of them like you did in high school, you’re going to get screwed.
So remember, whenever you do anything that involves courses and your academic record, send an email to your advisor and an email to the Registrar.
If you do this, I guarantee that you will never feel the full effect of God’s wrath. College GPA is arguably more important than your high school GPA. It determines your first job, whether you get into law school, medical school or that graduate program you so desperately want. It determines financial aid, fellowships, scholarships and study abroad programs you can attend. It may even determine the sex of your unborn child.
So take the Office of the Registrar seriously.
trinitytripod
The Trinity TriBlog 