I find it amusing and slightly distressing that so many professors at Pomona College perceive the Pass/No Credit option as their bureaucratic nemeses. Perhaps Professor of Art History Judson Emerick and his gang of anti-grade inflators are unaware of the complete chaos of the class scheduling system for students. I truly hope the P/NC change is the start of a complete restructuring. That would only be fair in light of the crap the school puts us through at times.

For example, this semester the first day of class was Tuesday, January 16 and the last day to add classes was Monday, January 29.

That effectively gave students who wanted to take a Monday night seminar only one class period to decide whether to take the class, and if you decided no, then you had to petition. And who wasn’t frustrated by having to receive professors’ signatures to add a class? I understand why this was warranted the first week of classes when power was out, but this was an asinine policy to keep in effect when the power was on and computers were functional! I was informed at the registrar’s office on January 29 after a whole week of power, that signatures were still necessary and that computers absolutely could not be turned on since "that would be unfair to the students who had to receive signatures when the power was out."

Imagine that the new P/NC guideline was in effect this year. That means not only would you have had the opportunity to go to a Monday night seminar only once, but you also would have been forced to have made up your mind regarding the P/NC option. Ludicrous! This is not even civil; it is brutal and dictatorial.

I disagree with the contention that students are using the P/NC option exclusively to adjust grades and protect GPAs. While this can be true, it is also used for several other reasons. Chief among them, protection from crappy professors. Breaking news: not every Pomona professor is God’s gift to teaching.

Although 99 percent of them believe they are and that their classes are the only ones that matter we, the students who take them, know the truth. Professors can overburden you with work (often irrelevant), treat you like a kindergartner, or approach their own teaching duties like a kindergartner. In that situation, one can ask, "Who’s wasting whose time?" And we, the students, often take these classes not because we have to, but because we are interested in the subject matter enough to warrant doing so; i.e. we personify the liberal arts.

In many situations students have no choice but to P/NC— we do not know immediately which classes will be the most burdensome or which professors will be the most annoying/incomprehensible/disappointing. It is at times a method of survival. The administration that is so often guilty of Swarthmore-envy is somehow unaware that schools like Swarthmore offer five-year plans.

Maybe some professors should take P/NC as a clue to their classroom methods, especially in lieu of a universal course review. Why don’t we have one of those? Is someone afraid that students might know beforehand who to avoid? Do professors fear standing before empty classrooms? Heaven knows a few should. Until we get a universal course review there will continue to be more than a few emperors running around without clothes on!

First give us a course review, then meet us halfway on the P/NC issue, reform the grade-inflation problem through more appropriate means, and then get over yourselves. We may be guilty of inflated grades, but that is somewhat better than an inflated ego.

And from what I’ve been led to believe over the last four years, aren’t the graduate schools inflating Pomona GPAs? If professors are going to complain about "poor work," that means they are hesitant to exercise the "NC" option at their disposals. That’s a personal problem. Professors, don’t mess with our scheduling.