This semester, if you experienced the unnecessary panic and frustration of needing to quickly decide whether or not to enroll in a course before the add/drop deadline, you are not alone. SFU consistently sets inappropriate deadlines that don’t give students enough time to evaluate a course and decide whether they are going to invest hundreds of dollars and endless hours into taking it.
With classes this spring semester beginning on Wednesday, January 3, I entered the second week of school not yet having taken three of the four lectures I was enrolled in. Shortly after classes commenced, I found out that the deadline to add or swap courses through goSFU, as well as the deadline to receive a full refund on any courses dropped, was Tuesday, January 9. I would have only a few hours after my first Tuesday lecture to decide on my final course schedule in order to avoid paying tuition penalties.
One lecture is not enough time to evaluate the workload, professor, and overall syllabus of a course. Some professors don’t even discuss the syllabus on the first day, so students have no idea how heavy the projects and assignments are going to be throughout the term. By the second week of classes, some of the lectures have not even had their tutorials yet. How is a student supposed to decide if they want to stay in a tutorial before they have even had it?
Compared to some other major BC universities, SFU has one of the shortest deadlines to change courses while receiving a full refund. While the deadlines to drop a course with a WD or W (withdrawal) standing on your academic record remain similar amongst other major universities, both UBC and UVIC give students two weeks on average to receive a full refund for any courses dropped. Although that still seems like too short a deadline for me, it at the very least gives students a chance to attend all their lectures and tutorials before deciding on what courses they will be taking.
In addition, the SFU penalty for dropping a course after the first week declares that students only receive 75% of their refund back. If a standard three-credit course costs $553.68, (unless you’re a business student; in that case, you have my greatest condolences), that leaves approximately $138.42 that SFU just gets to keep for absolutely no reason.
This is enough of an incentive to push students into sticking with a course schedule they may not entirely be comfortable with just so none of their money goes to waste. The current full refund deadline encourages students to decide their schedules quickly, rather than deciding them with their own best interests in mind.
On average, SFU students are given about one week to add or swap a course through goSFU, or to drop a class with no strings attached. The next drop deadline, to drop a course with financial penalty but without a notation on your record, follows soon thereafter, falling at around two weeks into classes. The order of these deadlines is not reasonable.
This semester, my best friend and I planned to enroll together in a fourth-year English course that would be the last one to complete our minors. However, with there being only 18 seats in the class, my friend didn’t manage to get in. With no waitlist available, she simply had to keep checking for the course to open again. Needless to say, it never did. At least, not until after the goSFU enrolment deadline had passed.
On January 10, someone decided to drop the course, but it was too late. My friend had already bought a $200 non-refundable textbook for her backup course, thinking that, since the enrolment deadline had passed, there was little chance that someone would end up dropping the course.
Having the goSFU enrolment deadline occur before the drop deadline is ludicrous and misleading. If the drop deadlines occurred before the enrolment deadlines, this would give students hoping to enroll in a class the chance to do so.
Overall, SFU needs to make changes to their course add/drop policy. Students are being ripped off and misguided, and it simply isn’t fair. At the very least, we should be given two weeks or more to amend our course schedules without paying any unnecessary tuition fees, in accordance with other BC universities that seem to be conducting things a little more fairly.
