Hot off the press, the November Senate agenda was released in time for some pre-meeting commentary, as follows.
The most relevant to our faculty is a proposal that has made its way from the First Year Office, through Senate Undergraduate Committee and now to Senate on Nov. 15. It can be found on page A77 (http://secretariat.uwaterloo.ca/governance/Senate/20101115oagsen.pdf). The proposal is suggesting that we change first promotional requirements to be in-line with upper year promotion requirements (i.e. 60% to get to the next term, as opposed to the current 50%). The stated rationale is that students who make it through with a sub 60% average simply aren’t prepared or ready for upper year, and will likely end up failing a term. So, how does increasing the average do anything other than cause the failure to occur earlier? Well, it doesn’t…which is why the proposal also suggests that if the promotional average requirement is raised to 60%, students will be allowed “to take a combination of reduced load terms, thereby completing 1A in two partial terms.”
I believe the intent and rationale for the proposal is certainly positive, however a very large risk/question remains. There are no specific details on how this plan will be implemented, specifically, how students at risk will be identified and how/when they must make the decision to split their 1A term into two. A balance needs to be found, it would likely not bode well for academic spirit if students are allowed to decide to split their 1A term in half the day before finals, alternatively, it would not bode well for student success if they had to decide in the first two weeks of class.
The worst case scenario with regards to this proposal is that the term average required for promotion rises by 10% without sufficient student understanding of their term splitting options. The end result would really just be a bump in the term average requirement with no offset for student success.
Some interesting figures regarding student financial support:
1) A total of $1 781 000 (1175 awards) was distributed to the 2010 first year engineering cohort (Presidents and Merit Scholarships)
2) A total of $7 496 823 (4202 awards) was distributed to all engineering undergrads in over the past year (Scholarships, bursaries, awards)
I will report back in the next issue of The Iron Warrior what happened during the November Senate meeting.
Keep being awesome, study hard for finals, and ask me questions if you have any! (senate@engmail.uwaterloo.ca)
Leave a Reply