YuLin Zhen, Photography Editor

This semester, add/drop period was twice as long as it was in fall 2023. 

The University chose to try out the extended add/drop period, seven days longer than last year, following advocacy by the Yale College Council, which had collected data last fall indicating that the student body was generally unhappy with how short the shopping period was. 

Per Dean of Yale College Pericles Lewis, this semester’s extra long add/drop period was an “experiment.” Lewis told the News that the window to shop for classes will be shorter next semester, getting rid of the extra Monday and Tuesday, but likely keeping a day of Friday classes. 

“It was one week for a while, but there was a problem not having Fridays,” he explained. “I think next semester we’re going with Friday, which I think may be where we wind up settling, because I’m not sure you really need the Monday and Tuesday, which makes it roughly two weeks.”

Lewis confirmed that feedback from YCC was “partly responsible” for the longer add/drop period. 

YCC Academic Policy Director Kyle Thomas Ramos ’26 wrote that in the YCC’s surveys the main problem students found with the short add/drop period was “the fact that the previous system did not allow students to attend any courses on Friday before deciding to take them for the semester.” 

Although Lewis indicated that next semester’s shopping period would include a Friday, he said that administrators would revisit the issue in the next academic year.   

“The main concern that I’ve heard from YCC and others is the Friday classes, but it turns out that that’s a relatively small problem because only so many classes meet on Fridays only,” Lewis said. “But we’re going to look at all the data as to when students actually add and drop courses and come to a conclusion for next year.” 

Lewis added that the aim of an extended add/drop period this semester was to prevent situations in which many students had to submit special petitions to change their schedules after the shorter add/drop, as was the case in past semesters.

“Because of this wider window, it is expected that students will complete their final fall schedules by the end of add/drop, which means late adds, i.e., requests to add a class after 5pm on September 10, are less likely to be approved,” Davenport College Dean Adam Ployd wrote in an email students in Davenport.

The News also spoke to senior lector Fan Liu, the Yale Chinese Program coordinator, and senior lector Rongzhen Li, the program’s previous coordinator. Both explained that the lengthened add/drop period can cause difficulties from faculty members’ perspective. 

“I think that add/drop period is a bit too long,” Li told the News in Mandarin. “When it’s too long, it actually brings us a lot of inconvenience in arranging tutoring and presentation schedules. Some students can’t change sections easily, too.”

Liu also said that add/drop period is a crucial time for the Chinese faculty to determine total enrollment numbers and whether more sections of Chinese courses are needed. 

In some instances, she says, a large section may be split into two smaller sections, and lecturers will then need to adjust their schedules and reserve classrooms accordingly.

“If there are too many students in a class, we try to split the class into two as early as possible,” Liu told the News in Mandarin. “But when we don’t know the number of students, we can’t make such arrangements. The allocation of teachers and classrooms takes time.”

With a lengthened add/drop period, students in L1 and L2 language classes that meet daily may miss out on important basics as they shop for other classes during conflicting time slots, per Liu.

“There are only 13 or so weeks for instruction in a semester,” Liu said. “So when over two of those weeks are consumed by the add/drop period, that holds up both teachers and students. Sometimes students will miss classes during add/drop period in order to attend other classes, so we will help them review missed content outside of class time. Thus, the teacher’s work is also very busy at the beginning of the school year, and the long period causes certain inconveniences to the teacher’s work.”

The University Registrar will charge a $5 processing fee for each course added or dropped after the end of add/drop period.