Editorial

Administration Drops the Ball

The student body depends on the administration to set up programs and troubleshoot problems when they arise, and too often the administration screws up. When the College fails to come through, it is the students who suffer — the men’s basketball team in particular, this time.
The Yeomen had their best season in a decade, finishing fifth in the conference with nine wins, including a quarterfinal victory over Ohio Wesleyan University in the NCAC tournament. They were on their way to playing Wittenberg in the semifinals, but they never got the chance, having instead to forfeit their entire season because of an administrative oversight.
The team’s excitement and hope has been replaced by crushing despair because the Oberlin administration failed to double check on a transfer student’s eligibility, and it was not discovered until the post season that the Yeomen had been playing with an ineligible athlete. Any number of offices might have caught the mistake, including the admissions office, the registrar or the athletics department, who are most closely related to the issue and are probably the most responsible for this fiasco.
As a team, the Yeomen came together in the second half of the season and through some hard work pulled together a great campaign, overcoming both their opponents and the extra stress of more stringent rules following the controversies of the fall semester. However, their official record is now 0-25. Some may say the season was not a complete loss, that the team will come away with important lessons learned. No one on the men’s basketball team is saying anything like that.

Academic Re-evaluations Valuable

Ask any Oberlin student from the past 10 years and they will tell you that credit values for courses are too low, and at last the Educational Plans and Policies Committee has decided that this is an issue that warrants a more detailed inquiry.
The typical Oberlin student is devoted to a lot more than their classes. They involve themselves with student organizations, jobs, sports (varsity, club, or intramural), community projects, musical groups and a myriad of other activities that do not always result in grades that appear on their transcript. Having to balance these extracurricular activities with a course load that does not reflect the credit value awarded can — and does — cause a lot of stress for a great number of students.
In addition to causing excessive stress, the current system leads students to overfill their course loads to meet graduation requirements,which actually depreciates the quality of education that students get from any given class, since they cannot devote as much time as they should.
The EPPC has also decided to look into the length of reading period. Again, it is an excellent choice to finally begin to listen to the student body, which has been demanding more time at the end of the semester for years. The moving of due dates for papers from the last day of reading period to the exam date for the class was a step in the right direction, but still fails to create more time for students to finalize what should be a large amount of learning from the semester. Having an honor code to which all students consent should allow the College to permit self-scheduled exams, which would allow students to manage their time themselves.
The grading system is also coming under scrutiny. Established in 1971 when a host of other colleges were looking into alternative grading systems, the No Entry option has endured even though most other colleges have returned to entering failing grades. With Oberlin looking generally to align itself with peer institutions, it is no surprise that they are re-evaluating this policy, even though students value having it as an option to relieve the mounting stress of classes.
Talking about making changes to these policies is a good step, but actually altering them would be better. Moving through the bureaucracy and actually implementing these changes will take time, so the faster the administration gets started, the better.