Starting next semester, Spring semester of year 2015, the course add/drop period will be rescheduled to one week before and one week after the start of semester. Even though it will still be two weeks, students will be only able to attend and pre experience the courses only for one week.

It is hard to imagine what it would be like to have course add/drop period one week before the start of the semester. During this week students will only be able to make changes according to the syllabus, hence I expect not many changes will be made during this session. As a result, the first week after the start of the semester will be even more busy and confusing as students only have two chances of attending the course per each lecture before making the final decision. When one student did not like the course on the first day, the student only have one more chance to look for the new lecture that fits that particular time of the schedule. This decrease in the opportunity for students to actually go around, attending the classes before finally enrolling the courses is expected to raise some complaints and confusions at first. This change of guidelines on Registration and Course Enrollment Procedures are enforced from January 1, 2015.

There are changes in course drop period also following next semester. We currently had course drop period within two weeks after course add/drop period. Hence, until now, within the first month of the semester, students finalized their course enrollment. However, from next semester, the course drop period gets prolonged and students can drop their courses within seven weeks after the start of semester, which is one week before mid-term examination.

In addition, there will also be changes in course registration period. In this semester, we register courses for the next semester during this semester. Hence, during the first week of December, we registered courses for the 2015 Spring semester. However, starting next semester, we will register for courses during vacation sessions for the following semesters. In short, the period changed from first week of December/May to first week of January/July. This change is meaningful in a way that with the change, current/returning/new students will all have the same course registration period. In the past, current students had registration period before the new and returning students hence they had better change of registering for the popular courses. The new change will eliminate those disadvantages and equalize every student with the same opportunity.

The new changes regarding course registration and dropping is one of the policies in school that directly affect students in so many ways. I hope students enroll in courses more conveniently and equally with these new changes.