Resigning Courses
Every semester, I am asked by student in my courses whether they should resign my course, and by my advisees whether they should resign various other courses. My advice is almost always the same: only if you really need to.
There are two airtight reasons to resign a course:
You are doing poorly in multiple courses, and jettisoning one of them will allow you to succeed in the others.
You expect a poor outcome in a course that will adversely affect your financial aid or academic eligibility, and resigning will prevent this.
There are also less airtight reasons to resign that still carry some weight, although they come, for me, with more caveats:
You expect a poor outcome in the course, do not need it, and do not plan to re-take it.
You are miserable in the course and have reason to believe that you will not be when you re-take it.
In most other cases, I feel that the disadvantages of resigning a course, particularly a required course, outweigh the advantages. The disadvantages include a temporary depression of your GPA, possible complications in the calculation of future “degree-applicable credits” (in the event that you do not fail the course but are not content with your letter grade), and present academic stress, among other things. The advantages may include a temporary sense of pressure relief, a transcript that is easier to “explain,” etc.
On the other hand, the large advantage of staying in a course, even when it is going poorly, is that you are almost certainly still learning important things. If the course is one that you plan to re-take, the more material you learn the first time around, the more success you will enjoy for the same amount of work put in the second time. Even if you cut back your effort in order to focus on other things and maximize your total semester success, you will have heard the material, seen the projects, and taken the final exam – all things with non-trivial value.
Of course, best case scenario, you stay in the course and it turns out OK, and you simply move on in your education and career! This happens more often than you would think when you are staring down a course that feels like it is going poorly, particularly for courses which are graded on a curve.
Only you can decide if it is right for you to resign a course – ideally after hearing the advice of the financial aid office and your academic advisor – but unless there are extenuating circumstances I would ordinarily recommend against it. If you re-take the course, assuming you take it twice, the new grade will replace the old in your GPA. And, of course, if you resign you remove the possibility that you actually pass the course with a grade you can tolerate.