EngSoc

VP Education: Work Term Report Survey Results!

Note: This article is hosted here for archival purposes only. It does not necessarily represent the values of the Iron Warrior or Waterloo Engineering Society in the present day.

Hi everyone and welcome to the second last edition of my exec updates. It’s kind of crazy how almost 16 months have gone by since I’ve started. I still have some things to share this week about work term reports, so let’s get to it.

I’ve mentioned in my past few exec updates a work term report survey that I was preparing. That was sent out about two weeks ago and I wanted to discuss the preliminary results of the survey. I’ll also be presenting a more detailed version of this at council and a full report will be available on the EngSoc website.

So, what exactly did we learn? Well, it turns out a lot of people have a lot of complaints about how work term reports are currently run (shocker). But there are some more interesting data points than just that.

A couple points of note: When asked how easy it was to find a report topic from their work term, only 20% of students said that it was easy to find a topic. When asked about marking, only 40% of students felt like the technical requirements were clear, while 35% were unsure of how the report itself was marked. Lastly, only 50% of students felt like they had a useful contact for asking questions about their report.

Included in the survey questions was an open comment section, as well as a place to give suggestions for reports. The key things were that students want more flexibility in the structure of their reports and feel like the reports are an outdated form of technical communication. Other concerns were raised about confidential work term reports and how the reports were graded.

As mentioned before, the full results of the report will be published in the coming weeks and my plan is to send it out to the department chairs as well. The goal of this whole process is to give the departments and the society the information it needs to improve work term reports as a whole. Out of all the pain points students have, this is one of the worst and I want to make sure we are doing everything we can to make them better.

That’s all I have for this week, and my next update will be my last as VP Education. It’s been a pleasure to represent engineering students over the past year. As always, my email is vpeducation.a@engsoc.uwaterloo.ca if you have any questions or concerns. Cya in two weeks.

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