Your health, your problem

As the November withdrawal date approaches, students face the decision of whether or not to end their participation in a particular class. The option of withdrawal adds considerable flexibility for students, as it is the final way for a student to avoid a bad class affecting their GPA (with the downside of adding a “W” to your transcript). The process is an acknowledgment that the drop/add period does not always provide sufficient time for some students who may realize they are outmatched by a course. It also adds enough drawbacks to prevent students from taking advantage of it.

Although the withdrawal deadline takes into account academic difficulties, such as being overloaded by classwork or simply joining a class without proper preparation, Duke has always offered a medical withdrawal. In previous years, these medical withdrawals extended to the last day of classes, and offered a student an ability to drop a class (with the “W” distinction) after the official withdrawal date in extreme circumstances. It also allowed students who have already dropped to underloading during their time at Duke to do so again.

The process made sense. There are various extreme circumstances that can never be taken into account in advance. Stress for serious problems outside of the classroom or actual illness does not always happen before the November deadline. The medical withdrawal’s late deadline takes this into account. Students are given every opportunity to state their circumstances and have an independent third-party—usually CAPS for stress or other mental illness or a doctor for physical illness—decide whether or not circumstances justify a medical withdrawal. The process has multiple checks and balances. It makes sense.

And, like many others who have come before it, the sensible process was changed. Medical withdrawal now has a deadline, and unsurprisingly it comes on the same date as regular withdrawal, four weeks before the last day of classes, which for Fall semester comes in November. The November deadline means that there is no technical way to get out of a course in the last month of classes due to extreme circumstances. Something so logical as a last-ditch escape for those seriously affected by outside circumstances was eradicated.

One of the major reasons why it had to be eliminated was that students would take advantage of it. Since there was no actual deadline for medical withdrawal, students would feel free to wait until the last day of classes and declare stress or an illness, trying to use medical withdrawal to avoid the inevitable. These cases would inundate CAPS and Student Health with nonsense and therefore impede both offices’ ability to do serious work for those in need.

Eliminating the idea of medical withdrawal panders to the minority of students who decided to take advantage of the scenario. It becomes a situation of “your health, your problem,” as the onus falls on the student to somehow mitigate other circumstances or come up with a convincing enough excuse to find an ulterior way to withdraw (currently there is no official way to get out of a class after the November deadline). Considering no structure currently exists for an outside withdrawal, an illness or family emergency during the last month of school is essentially a death sentence.

Understanding that any late medical withdrawal date will be taken advantage of, there has to be a way to mitigate the situation without having to completely eliminate it. The first and most obvious solution is to move the medical withdrawal date a week or so before the last day of classes, but this will just mean CAPS will be slammed a week earlier and students who face extreme circumstances the last week are in the same situation.

Instead, the process of medical withdrawal should still occur on the last day, with the idea that it should be tiered. The idea of a medical withdrawal is that there are extreme circumstances out there that would prevent a student from doing his or her best (or even close to it) in a course. Where it fails is that students use this process and go directly to CAPS, finding (or making up) the best excuse to get out of a course. Instead, these students should be going to professors, as most would understand if something terrible came up. The medical withdrawal would then come into place when the two parties could not work out an arrangement—when withdrawal would be best for the student.