Friday marked the grade option deadline, the last day of the semester in which students could decide whether they wanted to take a class for a letter grade or on a “pass/fail” basis. The end of the ninth week of the semester also used to be the drop deadline, the final day when we could drop a class without penalty.

But University provost Mary Ann Swain and the Faculty Senate long ago sacrificed the drop deadline — and the academic freedom that came attached to it — in the name of streamlining the Binghamton University bureaucracy. And the pass/fail deadline may be up next: as reported in the last issue of this newspaper, administrators are now considering moving the deadline, although they don’t yet know which way, or whether to do it at all.

One option under consideration is moving the deadline to the end of the semester, right before finals. This would be the best: it gives us the time to figure out whether a course has lived up to its BUSI description and syllabus-promised grading policies — some don’t — and whether we’re comfortable adding that course to our academic transcripts.

More likely, though, is that the deadline will either remain where it is or be moved far closer to the beginning of the semester, to the same day as the current add/drop deadline, ten days in. One reason that’s been cited for moving the pass/fail deadline to the same time as the add/drop deadline is the paperwork it will save administrators. In the end, though, it’s our education; they’re here to help us get our degrees. Having us submit to earlier deadlines in the name of streamlining their bureaucracy, of oiling the machine, would be asking us to sacrifice our academic freedoms.

Another cause for moving the pass/fail deadline up, administrators say, is the suppressing the effect it will have on grade inflation and “abusing” the system. They say students abuse the pass/fail deadline’s late-in-the-semester timing — and they would accordingly do more of the same with a later deadline — to slack off in class, doing no work and choosing at the last minute not to have it count for their GPAs. We’re hurting ourselves, they say, by abusing the system — but we’re pretty sure that administrators wouldn’t give themselves more paperwork to do in the name of saving us from ourselves.

That’s the attitude that separates BU from the Ivy Leagues, to which administrators love to compare us. Ivy League schools treat their students like coveted clients at a specialty store, doing what they can to help them get the most out of the learning process. Here, it’s more like we’re waiting on line at the DMV — we’re all cogs in the degree-granting machine here, slaves to a system that makes us submit for the sake of its convenience. Lost in the process is the fact that we’re here to educate ourselves, and we’re paying to do so. We’re swamped by deadlines and policies and bureaucracies that seem to serve only themselves, with we the students as mere passive participants in what’s supposed to be our education, what are supposed to be our lives.

Not that moving up the pass/fail deadline is the plan yet. There is currently no strategy for changing the pass/fail deadline, only rumination among academic policymakers like the deans and the provost. But that doesn’t mean that such a plan couldn’t develop, and that’s why it’s vital that our student leaders — in particular, Student Association Academic Vice President Anna Robak — lobby the provost, deans and the Faculty Senate against moving the grade option deadline up to the add/drop deadline.