I still remember sitting in the piping-hot PAC during Student Life 101 during the summer of 2008, just under two months before I came to Waterloo as a frosh, and listening to Dean Sedra speak to a crowd of incoming Engineering students about what laid ahead of them. He mentioned how most, if not all of us were from the top 5 – 10% of our respective high schools, and that we should come to terms with the fact that for most of us, that was going to change. We were going to be challenged, we were going to have to work, and not all of us were going to make it through. I remember sitting in those wood bleachers and starting to shake in my cowgirl boots a little, and I began to question what I had gotten myself into.
Two years and three and a half academic terms later, it turns out it all isn’t quite as impossible as it was made out to be, or at least not until third year. Don’t get me wrong, the switch from high school to university was easily the biggest academic kick in the ass I’ve received to date, but in hindsight not only was it bearable, but I’m grateful for it. When word came out of the proposed plan for the new 1A policy, raising the minimum passing 1A average to 60% but allowing struggling students to drop 2 of their 1A courses an finish their 1A term a year later, I couldn’t believe it. I understand that the faculty is trying to raise the percentage of passing students, but I strongly believe that this is not the way to go about it.
There are several fundamental problems with the justification of this plan, aside from the fact that the Faculty runs the risk of filling up their future class of 2016 not with incoming frosh, but rather 2015’s who opted for this new course of action. Firstly, the Faculty claims that by adding a special ‘study skills course’ to the student’s two remaining 1A courses in their second academic term, the struggling students will be able to learn the skills needed to succeed in later terms of study, such as study skills and time management. Unfortunately, beyond the basic definition of what these skills are, this isn’t something that can be entirely taught in the classroom. The only way you can learn how to balance the four assignments, three interviews, two lab reports and partridge in a pear tree that the average student gets bombarded with in a single week is by actually experiencing it and figuring out the best way to struggle through it. It isn’t pretty, but if you’ve done it once you can do it again, and there is no way any student can fully experience this while taking only three courses. Sure it would be nice to split up your work load in first year, but what about down the road, when the work really starts to pile up, and you’re not allowed to drop any courses? Suddenly the 1A course load doesn’t seem so bad.
Another point the faculty tries to make is that some students are not adequately prepared for University level courses in fundamental subjects such as math and chemistry. This may be true, but they’re forgetting one thing. It’s not that the students aren’t learning sufficiently, it’s that they’re not prepared, which last time I checked my dictionary, means that frosh are showing up without sufficient knowledge in these subjects from their high school days. Having completed all of my pre-university schooling in Ontario, including being part of the post-double-cohort era as well as the guinea pig generation of Ontario’s ‘re-vamped’ high school math curriculum, I can fully attest to the fact that it’s the high schools’ that are dropping the ball. In at least Ontario (which is really the only province I can speak to) the Provincial Government is progressively dumbing down the curriculum simply so public schools can boast higher grades and more grads frolicking off to University (even if it’s for an Art’s degree). At my high school in particular, whether or not you got anything valuable out of a course was purely based on the teacher, and whether or not they were aware of what material you needed to know to succeed in university, not the curriculum. Should you wish to pursue university, you should be guaranteed to be taught the adequate tools from your high school, not subjected to a lottery.
What scares me the most about this new policy is that it seems to be following the trend set by the Ontario curriculum. I understand that the faculty wants to ease students into their respective programs during the 1A term, but there’s a fine line between a smooth transition and dragging every student through their first term. Although I realize there are a number of students who do poorly or fail simply because they struggle with the academic material, there is an equal if not greater number of students who simply either do not want to be in university, do not care, or some combination of the two. Simply reducing the modest workload of what is arguably the easiest academic term in Engineering will not help those lacking motivation or time management skills, especially in terms to come. Focusing resources on first year TA’s, support systems for students, and targeting and helping those potentially at risk before they fail while keeping them in school will be much more successful. Many of us pride ourselves in hailing from one of the most difficult, and highly recognized engineering faculties in the country, and our faculty should focus on pushing students to achieve that same standard, not lowering the bar simply so every frosh can skip on by.
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