O-Week in Danger… Again
Welcome back, B-Soc! Hope the Fall term is off to a good start. As the title implies, there’s some interesting goings-on at UW right now so let’s get straight to it: Orientation week as we know it is in danger again. It was announced to the FedS Board of Directors that the Student Success Office has proposed a restructuring of the first year calendar to include a three day orientation week (Monday through Wednesday) followed by two days of classes. Around mid-October a “Success Week” would take place – Thursday and Friday of this week would be holidays with scheduled “success skills” programming including academic, social, mental and physical health programming. Mid-October is identified by the SSO as a good “check-in” time because stress is at a maximum for many students. A major metric for measuring the success of this program would be an increased retention rate of first-year students. UW currently stands at an 87.4% first-year retention rate which is amongst the lower retention rates in Canada. In this case, retention rate refers to the number of first-year students who stay at UW after their first year, not dropping out or transferring to another school (those who transfer programs are consider ‘retained’). This motion is expected to be brought to Senate at the next meeting on October 17th. If you have thoughts, feedback or opinions don’t hesitate to contact me before the meeting as I would love to hear from you!
In other news, Senate met for the first time since June on Sept. 19th. The meeting was relatively uneventful with numerous non-engineering academic program changes. A motion passed to senate by SUC modifying test administration policies was passed, featuring numerous protections for students. A more detailed report on these changes will be found in the next VP Education report.
There was some discussion on the new policy of locking students out of UW-ACE/Desire2Learn if they hadn’t arranged their fees on Quest. Senators felt that this invaded students’ privacy and forced professors to enforce financial policy. Registrar Ken Lavigne stated that paying and arranging fees are separate and that professors are only to direct those students to the finance office. The purpose is to reduce the number of students who haven’t arranged their fees.
A little background for the first years:
Senate is the highest level of academic governance at UW. It meets once a month and is mostly what you could call a “rubber-stamping” committee – it examines motions passed up by sub committees (such as Senate Undergraduate Council (SUC) or the Undergraduate Studies Committee (FUGS)) and makes recommendations to the Board of Directors for implementation. Senate discusses a huge range of issues including academic program changes, calendar changes, degree requirements, and all other academic related issues. Each faculty has an undergraduate representative, so if you hear about some upcoming issue that will be passed to senate, contact me! I am here to represent you as an engineering student. senate@engmail.uwaterloo.ca
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