Syllabus week is exactly what it sounds like—a week-long slow torture in which teachers review the same rules you’ve been following since your exit from the womb, and in a few cases, weird grading scales.
For the most part, everything’s the same every year. The furthest teachers have gotten, on average, is halfway into the first chapter or lesson. So here comes the question: why are students expected to determine their capability to take and pass a class a week after syllabus week? There’s not enough time for students to experience the actual coursework in order to make such a decision in the short time allotted by the counseling department.
The counselors’ aim to place students in the classes they want as soon as possible is understandable. The short time frame helps class numbers stabilize faster, so teachers don’t have to deal with the burden of students moving in and out when lessons are already in progress.
However, is slight inconvenience for teachers really worth placing students in classes they feel unfit for? My answer is no—even colleges allow three to four week periods for students to change. If counselors and teachers are truly concerned about students missing valuable lessons while changing their schedules, the students who wish to change classes can be held accountable for the material they’ve missed. Instead of stopping students from being in their desired courses to prevent falling behind, it would be more reasonable to assume students in the right courses will succeed more progressively than their counterparts in classes they have no interest in.
If students were allowed more time to experience the difficulty and load of courses before fully committing, pass rates and campus-wide morale would both increase.