Mira Costa’s administration recently established a policy that limits flexibility in the schedules of advanced placement and honors students. This policy infringes upon a student’s ability to learn effectively and unfairly requires students to make crucial academic decisions about their future based on little information.
Students who have enrolled in honors or AP classes must sign an agreement stating that they will take these classes for the entire school year. According to administrators, even if students have a failing grade at the end of the first semester, there is no guarantee that they will be able to drop the class.
This new policy punishes students who attempt to do as much as they can to improve their education. In the current enrollment system, students can’t know how difficult or time consuming a class is aside from its ambiguous label as an honors or AP class, the vague Course Description Handbook or hearsay from students who have previously taken the class.
The faculty does not provide a descriptive syllabus of each class until a student is actually sitting in that classroom on the first day of school, when it is then too late to make any changes. Therefore, the new policy forces students to make a blind guess concerning their ability to handle an unknown situation.
Students will be allowed to make complaints about their course-load on a case-by-case basis, but the administration anticipates that few (if any) students will be able to change their schedules once the commitment form has been signed. The administration says this policy has been enacted to combat a rising number of students who drop AP and honors classes in the first week of school, and to discourage students from signing up for a course simply on a whim. It would alleviate the pressure on guidance counselors and vice principals to manipulate the master schedule so that class sizes are balanced.
This may be an issue, but it should not be dealt with by punishing students who cannot know exactly how difficult their schedules will be in the fall.
To solve this problem, administrators and faculty should work to expand the Course Description Handbook and make pre-course meetings for honors and AP classes mandatory, in which teachers could pass out a syllabus, expanding students’ awareness of the difficulty of the class they intend to take.
In addition, a one-week grace period for students to drop a class should be added at the start of the year. It would be a reduction from the scheduling flexibility of previous years, thus decreasing the administrators’ workload, but will be enough time for students to determine their ability to perform in a class.
The administration must find a better way to deal with this issue other than simply alienating Mira Costa’s ambitious students.
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