At my place, students can add up to the end of week2 (of 12).
Yesterday (after 1 1/2 weeks), I had a student add. By today, he seems to have dropped. ?!?
By this time he's missed two labs, (since labs are early in the week), an online quiz and a lecture quiz. (Plus, of course, 1 1/2 weeks of lecture material.) It's difficult, if not impossible, to "make up" all of that.
How late should adds be allowed?
Horror stories?
(It is rare, in my experience, that someone who adds late really does great in a course.)
Our add period is also 2 weeks-- I think it would be much better if it was 1. There could still be late-add exceptions made on a case by case basis (e.g., sometimes students have enrollment holds, but are actually attending while they wait for them to be lifted).
Quote from: marshwiggle on January 18, 2024, 06:22:22 AM(It is rare, in my experience, that someone who adds late really does great in a course.)
Yeah, same here. We allow adds for 1.5 weeks. I'd rather it be for 1 week at most.
Our adds end at the end of the first week of classes, which I think is best. In the old days we went two weeks or more
and folks missed several labs before adding.
We only allow a week.
My current institution only allows a week. I taught for a while at a place that allowed adds 2 weeks into a 15 week semester. Rarely was anyone successful who added at the end of the second week and it was such a pain to deal with all the late/missed work they had to make up.
We allow 2 weeks and we are on 10-week quarters! It's really bad for classes with labs. And we aren't told when someone adds late. So, unless they self-identify, I have no way to know who they are. I've also noticed that the late adds typically do not pass.
Horror story:
We offer 5-week summer session classes. That means 6 hours of lecture + 2 labs every week.
Registration still allows students to add at the end of Week 2.
That's right - students can miss 40% of a class and still add. They won't pass.
It seems to me, as I look at the posters on this thread, most of us are in things with labs. I wouldn't be surprised if the admincritters who think two weeks late is still OK are from other programs, (and apparently pretty non-demanding ones at that.)
But even classes like Econ, at our college, have a number of low stakes, but important, assignments.
If you miss early ones, its hard to get up to speed. Good students can do it well enough, but poor students who can hardly do this when they are there from day one, can not accelerate the learning curve.
Are there many fields and/or courses that are very non-heierarchical and non-sequential? Those would seem to be the only kind that would be relatively easy to catch up in, since all one would need to do is learn the missed material before a mid-term or final. In anything that isn't like that, then catching up all has to be done essentially ASAP since current material won't be comprehensible until the missed material has been assimilated.
For several years I taught an introductory online asynchronous course for a community college in another state. It generally had a 40 per cent attrition rate. Students would often add the course two to three weeks late, which required my permission. I would always tell the student and their advisor that while I would let the student in, I did not advise doing this since there was quite a bit of work to make up and most students adding this late failed the class, but that I would work with the student to catch up if they wanted. They always promised to do this, but most of them ended up failing.
One semester, about two weeks into the semester, I got a call on my cell phone from the university president (!) who was very anxious for me to take part in a new initiative, a late-starting course that started a month later than normal, ended at the same time, and covered the same material as the regular course. The idea was that there were many students who had been unable to register for the normal course but still wanted/needed to take another course. I agreed. Of the dozen students who enrolled, not one finished the course. This was the only class I have ever taught in more than 20 years' teaching in which every single student failed.
As an aside, I think it is actually a good idea to have some staggered courses, because there are reasons why students might need to start late. However, taking students who are by definition marginal (because they couldn't get it together to register on time, for whatever reason), put them in class that has a high attrition rate, in a modality that many find more challenging, with a professor who is by definition marginal (because I was in another state and only teaching online as an adjunct), and making it more difficult by compressing the course is not a recipe for success in any circumstances.
Presumably admin thinks that greater flexibility will lead to more customer satisfaction. I wonder if they have any evidence that works for extended add periods. Generally, it leads to students having more problems.
I'd like students to have to read out loud and then sign a document before they add a class saying that they understand:
-- adding a class late may cause them problems that are not solvable by the faculty member
-- they are responsible for catching up on all the material that was covered before they added
-- they should not expect to be the faculty member's top priority regarding problem solving when they add a class late.
If students would agree with this, I'd be happy with extended add periods.
Quote from: marshwiggle on January 18, 2024, 11:17:03 AMIt seems to me, as I look at the posters on this thread, most of us are in things with labs. I wouldn't be surprised if the admincritters who think two weeks late is still OK are from other programs, (and apparently pretty non-demanding ones at that.)
It's usually a week, which is late even for non-lab courses. Writing courses are for the most part workshops, so if students miss the first week, they are already at a disadvantage because they've missed out on getting feedback on short writing prompts, and the deconstruction of paragraphs. They've also missed out on low stakes assignments which are designed to help them with susequent assignments. I once had the chair of VeryImportantMajor asking me to help a student who had missed the first two weeks of class by reteaching the materials covered during the four missed classes during office hours. I had to remind the VeryImportantMajor chair that this was a writing course, where students learning by practicing and honing their skills and that the syllabus clearly stated that missed classes would not be retaught. Chairs as well as students have told me that "it's only English" to excuse absenses and missed assignments.
Unless the students are higly motivated, late additions do not fare well in writing courses.
I am a historian. It is, objectively speaking, not that difficult to make up two or even three weeks of an introductory course: you would have to read three chapters, which may be between 60 and 90 pages. You would also have to post the weekly discussion boards, and I allow students to do this late.
And in this particular course, the units were not necessarily linked (i.e., you could learn about Ancient Africa without having done the unit on Mesopotamia).
All of this is why I did allow students to enter late. However, students had a very hard time going from 0-60 so rapidly. Not only did they have to jump right into the material, they had to go back and do previous units' reading. And since there was an exam around week five or six, they didn't have too much time to do it.
If I taught a lab course, or even a language course (where you cannot do unit 4 without having done the previous units), I don't think it would have even have been theoretically possible. Which might have been better because students would not have tried.
I really wish that that admins would believe us when we say that late adds don't do well. In our department we even have hard data on this. Intro Basket weaving in our department is a HUGE course than many first semester freshmen take. It has a lab. Because of this we always end up with a few lab sections being created right before the first day of class to "catch" these late add students. The failure rate in these sections when compared to the rest is astounding.
We have pointed this out to any admin who cares to listen. They all nod in sympathy and then tell us to "work our magic" as teachers. URGH!
Quote from: mythbuster on January 19, 2024, 09:23:58 AMWe have pointed this out to any admin who cares to listen. They all nod in sympathy and then tell us to "work our magic" as teachers. URGH!
These admins have the same magical thinking as the students who show up in the last week of classes having blown off much or all of the term now looking for the "shortcut" to learning the course material.
THE EXISTING SCHEDULE OF LECTURES, ASSIGNMENTS, QUIZZES, ETC.
IS THE SHORTCUT!
I seem to recall a post from Polly on the old fora providing evidence that students who enroll late (for whatever reason) fundamentally do more poorly (for the same reasons) than students enrolled on Day 1. Anyone remember that or have the link to her study?
Perhaps psychology types could comment but I would think that enrolling late for classes would tend to correlate negatively with conscientiousness and conscientiousness correlates positively with grades So it wouldn't surprise me that overall, as long as one had a meaningful sample, late adders would get lower grades either overall or specifically in the courses they add late.
At our place classes start on Monday and then that Friday at 5pm is the last drop/add date. I was surprised to see they only got 5 days (I don't teach undergrads so I am out of touch a bit), but that makes me feel pretty good about the powers that be here. As everyone says, 2 weeks can be a tough upward battle to try to catch up, particularly if they can't understand what is going on in class until they do catch up (think organic chemistry or the like...).
In my department, we have a lab intensive class where the labs are 2x weekly, and you can only miss three before you fail the course. I've seen students add at the end of week two, having already failed the course. It should not be allowed, but the adminicritters won't listen.
Quote from: FishProf on January 19, 2024, 01:48:26 PMIn my department, we have a lab intensive class where the labs are 2x weekly, and you can only miss three before you fail the course. I've seen students add at the end of week two, having already failed the course. It should not be allowed, but the adminicritters won't listen.
Presumably because the students are paying tuition for the courses that they have no chance of passing, and so the institution is profiting. The money so wasted is coming from parents, from students' own future earnings (with interest), and from the taxpayers.
If ordinary voters were privy to a lot of what gets discussed on some of these threads, there would probably be even more skepticism among the general public regarding the value and trustworthiness of institutions of higher education than there already is. And there would be even more fuel added to the fire of the student loan forgiveness debate--some saying it's even more imperative that we forgive loans to students who've been conned out of their tuition like this, others more opposed than ever to bailing out feckless students.
Quote from: apl68 on January 20, 2024, 06:13:21 AMPresumably because the students are paying tuition for the courses that they have no chance of passing, and so the institution is profiting.
For an open-admissions school (like mine), I think the calculation is that it is better to have the student sign up for a class late and maybe (probably?) fail than not enroll at all. For schools that cost more money, there is probably a customer-service mentality as well.
I can think of several structural reasons.
First, at least at my school, students need to take a certain amount of credits to maintain financial aid. Several times I have seen students who would be better off dropping a class counseled to keep the class and fail for reasons of keeping financial aid.
Second, again at my school, overall enrollment needs to be maintained so the school doesn't loose funding. If a student does not get financial aid, they will likely drop out, and the school will face a budget shortfall.
Third, faced with all this, the administration's response is to hope that it will all resolve itself in the end. I suppose that for administrators and advisors this allows themselves to act like (and maybe even believe) that they have "solved" a problem, rather than create one.
And for all I know, for some students, it might in fact work out: I only notice the street lights that burn out when I walk by them, not the ones that remain lit. That said, even if for most students being able to add a course so late in the semester (which I doubt), there are enough students for whom it doesn't work that the strategy should be reevaluated.
Quote from: jerseyjay on January 20, 2024, 06:53:15 AMThird, faced with all this, the administration's response is to hope that it will all resolve itself in the end. I suppose that for administrators and advisors this allows themselves to act like (and maybe even believe) that they have "solved" a problem, rather than create one.
I'd say less hope, more expecting the instructors to magically make the students successful.
Back in the good ol' days (I guess I've been teaching long enough to say that), student adds were stopped the day before classes started. After that students could only add with instructor permission, even if the class hadn't met yet.
Later we switched to open adds for two weeks. Instructors only found out if the students contacted us (some did, some didn't) or if we happened to be checking our rosters or online grade books. We would get emails from the admin telling us to be flexible with these students. Somehow that never seemed fair to the responsible students who had signed up for class on time.
The current policy is to let them add for a week and a half (which makes no sense to me at all), again, without notifying the instructor. Just to be the outlier here, I did have a student add at the end of the period last semester who defied expectations and finished in the top quarter of the class.
At my uni, admins used to regularly ignore the add deadline, and I had students placed in my classes halfway through the semester, or even in one spectacular case, after the final exam.
While I fully agree with everything that has been said -- late adds never do well, administrators are often more motivated by the tuition revenue associated with "customer satisfaction" than by amount learned, etc. -- I'll throw out another factor:
In the USA, university curricula are ridiculously complex, filled with meaningless requirements, and as a result exceedingly difficult for students to navigate. University curricular design is overwhelmingly driven by the principle of "force undergraduates to be enrolled as full-time students for at least eight semesters." Students desperately trying to tweak their schedules to fit in a course that they didn't previously select, and that they will invariably perform terribly in, is one outcome of this.
Curricula should be greatly simplified. But this will never happen because it goes against the predominant business model of universities.
Quote from: Zeus Bird on January 21, 2024, 05:28:26 AMAt my uni, admins used to regularly ignore the add deadline, and I had students placed in my classes halfway through the semester, or even in one spectacular case, after the final exam.
That would probably be a violation of state and federal laws. We're required to submit the verification of attendance roster for each course by the end of the first or second week of class, depending on the institution.
Quote from: Langue_doc on January 21, 2024, 07:55:49 AMQuote from: Zeus Bird on January 21, 2024, 05:28:26 AMAt my uni, admins used to regularly ignore the add deadline, and I had students placed in my classes halfway through the semester, or even in one spectacular case, after the final exam.
That would probably be a violation of state and federal laws. We're required to submit the verification of attendance roster for each course by the end of the first or second week of class, depending on the institution.
Yes, it would be. I know that because I started making it known that I would send documentation to administration and the relevant students indicating when these students were added to the course, also noting our state's verification of attendance laws.
Amazingly, there were no more late adds after I started doing that, and it has never been a problem since!
I added courses late when I was an undergrad, and never had problems earning an A+ in those courses. Often in upper years, where my registration date was later than the first-and second-years, so courses I wanted as restricted electives or electives were full. Often people would drop during the first week, and I would then be able to add the course.
I always made sure to get the class notes from fellow students, and we never had labs the first week at my undergrad university, so missing labs wasn't an issue. As it was still the first week of the semester, it was easy to get caught up on readings and prepare for early assignments. Profs knew people could add/drop the first week, so the earliest any assignments were due was the second week of classes. Seemed, and seems, sensible to me.
Not everyone adding late is a slacker who couldn't get organized in time to register. Some of us just found classes were already full by the time we could register (different dates depending on your year and student number, so some years, other students in the same year as me could register earlier than I could; other years I could register earlier). Or I could only get into an evening section but much preferred a daytime one, etc.
I can see how more than a week of add/drop could cause issues, however.
Quote from: MarathonRunner on January 21, 2024, 04:25:08 PMI added courses late when I was an undergrad, and never had problems earning an A+ in those courses. Often in upper years, where my registration date was later than the first-and second-years, so courses I wanted as restricted electives or electives were full. Often people would drop during the first week, and I would then be able to add the course.
I always made sure to get the class notes from fellow students, and we never had labs the first week at my undergrad university, so missing labs wasn't an issue. As it was still the first week of the semester, it was easy to get caught up on readings and prepare for early assignments. Profs knew people could add/drop the first week, so the earliest any assignments were due was the second week of classes. Seemed, and seems, sensible to me.
Not everyone adding late is a slacker who couldn't get organized in time to register. Some of us just found classes were already full by the time we could register (different dates depending on your year and student number, so some years, other students in the same year as me could register earlier than I could; other years I could register earlier). Or I could only get into an evening section but much preferred a daytime one, etc.
I can see how more than a week of add/drop could cause issues, however.
I remember things like this happening back in the day too, and how students who added a bit late could still catch up if they made a priority of it (Never tried it myself). It sounds like this is happening more and more at some schools now. Maybe another case of a useful piece of flexibility that has somehow been allowed to get out of hand?
Quote from: MarathonRunner on January 21, 2024, 04:25:08 PMI added courses late when I was an undergrad, and never had problems earning an A+ in those courses. Often in upper years, where my registration date was later than the first-and second-years, so courses I wanted as restricted electives or electives were full. Often people would drop during the first week, and I would then be able to add the course.
I always made sure to get the class notes from fellow students, and we never had labs the first week at my undergrad university, so missing labs wasn't an issue. As it was still the first week of the semester, it was easy to get caught up on readings and prepare for early assignments. Profs knew people could add/drop the first week, so the earliest any assignments were due was the second week of classes. Seemed, and seems, sensible to me.
Not everyone adding late is a slacker who couldn't get organized in time to register. Some of us just found classes were already full by the time we could register (different dates depending on your year and student number, so some years, other students in the same year as me could register earlier than I could; other years I could register earlier). Or I could only get into an evening section but much preferred a daytime one, etc.
I can see how more than a week of add/drop could cause issues, however.
Absolutely, in some cases students may also want to switch from one section to another once someone else drops--a great example is going from an 8am class to a mid-afternoon. In one of our grad programs there is a required stats class that has two sections-- early morning and online. Many prefer the online version for this class, but the slots are limited. Needless to say the students try to wrangle switching from the early morning class if they can. In this case they are not behind as they have been enrolled in another section of the class, but able to better adjust their schedules. I remember doing that in undergrad with the "discussion" section in my physics class to find a time slot that worked better for me when there was a drop.