Professors said in November that more students are struggling with their classes this semester than they have noticed in the past.  

AACC professors and students said the stress and anxiety from the pandemic and the all-online semester have prompted some students to drop classes and many to do poorly this semester.  

“There’s an additional layer of problems associated with the pandemic,” Dr. April Copes, a communications professor, said. 

Madelyn Keir, a first-year communications student, said stress and anxiety played a part in her dropping a class this semester. “It was hard for me to retain the information and I wasn’t doing well,” she said. 

In fact, 13% of the 4,500 students who dropped one or more classes this semester said the pandemic was the reason, according to the Strategic Communications department. Last spring, 4,000 students withdrew from some or all classes, and 25% of them cited the pandemic. 

But some students said they lightened their course loads because they found online courses to be more stressful than in-person classes. 

“I love being a student and I’m usually a really good student,” second-year AACC transfer studies student Coral Derby said. “This semester the online aspect was just so stressful and threw me for a loop.”   

Copes said the pandemic has made it difficult for some students to study at home. 

For example, Copes said, some students are parents with children at home who also take online classes. Others are struggling financially because someone in their family has lost a job. And some “are really suffering because they’re used to having their connections with their friends or interacting with people in their classes or in the cafeteria, or in the clubs that they’re members of or just even in passing in the hallway,” Copes said. 

A few professors at AACC said they noticed that more students have dropped classes this semester than in prior years. 

Business professor Jay Miller said some students took on more than they could handle. 

“I definitely experienced where students didn’t expect certain aspects of the class and they got overwhelmed,” he said. 

Biology professor Brooke McHansen said she expected more students to drop classes as the end of the semester approached “because of the external stress that they’d fallen behind.” 

She said they might have fallen behind because of “semester fatigue … but it does seem students are falling behind as the number of COVID cases rise.”