Last Monday was the final day students could drop a class from their schedules with no reprisal.

If you want to drop a course now, you’ll have to go for the rest of your adult life with a “W” on your transcript that signifies you withdrew from a course.

If that sounds a bit crazy, especially when you consider that the new semester started less than a month ago, it’s because it is.

The current cutoff date for dropping classes is absurd, and it assumes that students are going to like a class as much on their first day as they will on their fourth week.

To be blunt, most students don’t even know if they fully enjoy their classes and want to commit to them this early into the semester.

Sometimes students think they’re going to love a certain class only to find themselves burned out only a few weeks into the semester.

Under the current cutoff schedule, students are doomed to either have a permanent “W” on their transcript, or have to muscle through an entire class they don’t enjoy taking for almost a quarter of a year.

An extra week of being able to drop a class with no repercussions is all that would be needed to fix this issue. Even as someone who is enjoying all their courses this semester, I cannot help but feel sympathy for any students who are currently locked into a course they hate.

I believe this current schedule is harmful to the Mercyhurst student body, as it locks students into classes that they have no way of knowing if they’re going to like or not. All this schedule does is punish students for not backing out of courses they’re not entirely confident in as soon as they can.