Kansas University student Dan Melsheimer had to skip class on Monday to wait in one very long line at Strong Hall.

“It seemed like all of campus was there to drop a course,” he said.

Melsheimer and dozens of other KU students found themselves caught in the jumble of a policy change forcing students to decide earlier than usual whether they want to bail out on a class.

Until this year, students could wait until the end to drop a class. But in a move to change what many saw as an overly liberal policy, KU’s university council last year passed a new policy, dividing semesters into thirds and barring students from dropping classes in the last third of the semester.

The deadline to drop a course was Monday, and students say the changeover was less than smooth.

“We just feel like there were a lot of communication errors,” said Hannah Love, a student senator.

Despite a mass e-mail sent to students, various documents reported different dates for when the deadline to drop classes was.

“Student planners still listed Dec. 7 as the withdrawal period,” KU student senator Marc Langston said. “There’s been an inconsistent message. We just think the university ought to be a little bit flexible, because we had to be flexible with the university.”

KU’s Student Senate has called for reopening the process for a short time so students can withdraw from courses. But some faculty would rather allow only those students with the proper paperwork who couldn’t wait in the long lines Monday the chance to drop their courses. KU’s university governance is expected to come to a final conclusion on the matter today.

Either way, some faculty say they don’t want to budge on the new policy.

“We changed a campus culture last year,” said Rick Hale, associate professor and university Senate president. “The campus culture was it’s OK to drop up until the last day. It’s not an unexpected thing that there’s now some push back to this new culture.”

Hale and others say the old policy needed to be changed because it didn’t encourage students to graduate in four years, it fostered grade inflation and it failed to give students an incentive to work hard in their classes.

But changing such a policy is a delicate issue when grades are at stake.

“Of course grades are going to be very important,” Melsheimer said. “If you’re able to see that you’re failing the class, you’re going to want to drop it because it’s going to take a huge hit on your GPA.”

But Hale, associate professor of aerospace engineering, said the emphasis should be on learning.

“There shouldn’t be so much focus on grades,” he said. “There should be focus on learning, but that’s hard to tell students.”