Add/drop. What a miserable phrase. Add/Drop. Ain’t no passing craze. It’s not even hyphenated like self-respecting series’ of connecting words. It uses a forward slash, which is the bastard redheaded stepchild of Father Punctuation. But what’s really terrible about it is the fact that it means pretty much nothing beyond a headache with Cornell software.

Why do we not have a shopping period here? And why do we kind of pretend we can add courses three weeks into the semester? Every Cornell student that has yet to receive a major blow to the head realizes that if you add a course after the first week you are behind. And after the second week, well, you’re drowning in a rapidly flushing toilet filled with a Big Red deuce.

Why do we even have a drop period lasting six weeks when a professor that hands back graded prelims before this time is as common as T.A.’s that have pronounceable names to native speakers of the English language?

Add period is a joke. Professors spend the first day going over the syllabus, making quippy little remarks they each think is so hilarious and so original, like,“I won’t read the syllabus to you guys because I know we all can read.” Then, each of these professors predictably proceeds to take up the full 50-to-75-to-115 minutes doing just that. If one more tenured anyone explains “this new thing called Blackboard that Cornell is using” to me I will gorge myself.

You see, if a student decides this class is not right for him, and attends another class that also meets at, say, TR 1:25-2:40 — like all the classes anyone actually wants always do — the next possible day, then this student invariably gets patronized by the new professor for not having come the first day. This professor either assumes said student is lazy and took the day off to nurse a hangover and a series of inexplicable bruises, or has figured out that no, he was not this kid’s first choice of professor. Maybe the other professor — the hot professor — had a bad personality and/or syllabus. If a student wants to switch their schedule after the first Monday and Tuesday of the semester, he is going to be at a disadvantage getting sections, and behind in reading especially if he didn’t purchase the books until he was sure he wanted to stay.

From personal experience, I can attest that there’s not even a point to having add period be three weeks long. I added a course last semester on the last add date, and I spent the next six weeks trying to catch up. This is an impossible feat if professors don’t put lectures up online, which, also in my experience, most professors don’t do.

Creating a shopping period different from Add/Drop might be a difficult task. Nonetheless, at minimum Cornell should encourage, or even require, that syllabi are made available to students along with the course descriptions online during PreEnroll. How much information do I really glean about a course from the Big Red Book or the roster? I can figure out if it fits into my plan of four-day weekends, but I can’t figure out if there are 25 required books, prelims versus papers, or even what specific topics the course covers, and by using which materials. Additionally, what’s up with the phantom section? I can’t count the number of times I had to sign up for a section I was cornered into taking that wasn’t even listed in the course roster.

If nothing else, the simple cost of books should really make the “shopping” in shopping period more relevant. Cornell has a fiduciary responsibility to reveal how much each course costs before pre-enroll. If one course forces me to spend $100 more on books than another course that fulfills the same requirement, I would certainly find this information useful. That’s $100 I won’t be spending on custom miniature likenesses of myself to give out to my friends. Or, you know, food. And that’s where Add/Drop really is lose-lose for everyone.