on the issues: education
As is my tradition, I’d like to talk about the platforms, starting with VP Ed. Issues and ideas matter regardless of who wins, so feel free to join in on the discussion. The ability to present an idea or a promise or a platform plank also matters.
Fear not – my comments will still be tempered with sarcasm and cynicism. Because apparently we’re NOT all adults here, I’ll take a moment to explicitly point out these are comments only on the written text of the platforms. Nothing else. Please do try to restrain yourself from assuming I am making judgments about the individuals.
Rob LeForte (platform)
1. I will work for low tuition.
Leading with a controversial, polarizing promise. I like it. I would say this should just be assumed, but … I understand saying it makes the voters happy.
2. I will advocate for more student spaces, where students can gather for study and collaboration.
This brings up fond memories of the student spaces referendum. This is one of those things that students want, but a majority are not willing to pay for it. This makes efforts on this front difficult as you are advocating an unfunded mandate: provide these things which you are not presently providing, without any additional money. It’s not an impossible task but it is an uphill battle. Two major capital projects are wrapping up during the next year (LSRI and the unnamed? academic building at LeMarchant and Coburg); the time to get student space was in the design phase, but perhaps there is room to wedge something into the space as designed.
3. I will push for increased Academic Integrity Education on campus
4. I will support sustainable initiatives at the Student Union
5. I will continue to offer engaging speakers and partner with more societies to bring the best and brightest to Dalhousie
“Make people cheat less”, a much less specific re-hash of last year’s promise, and he won’t stop the speaker series that he didn’t start. All useful and relevant; yet I remain underwhelmed.
6. I will ensure that the university administration increases necessary funding to support our international students
The interesting thing about this point is the confidence. “I will ensure”. The previous points were promises to try his best – “work for”, “advocate for”, “push for”. These words reflect his knowledge of reality: he doesn’t set university policy, but he can try to influence it. Why so certain about this one?
LeForte has been in an office for a year now (more on this later), and by all (most?) accounts he’s done a great job. I have respect for anyone who can play this role well for a year and still want to come back and do it again. My main complaint about this platform is that it seems more like an extended job description than a set of ideas that LeForte brings to the table. Sure he’ll work for lower tuition, and that’s great, but we expect any candidate to do that. Academic integrity education is also a basic expectation.
My second complaint is there is nothing here specific to graduate students. Obviously they will benefit from most of these things, and the two points that explicitly reference international students are proportionally more relevant to grad students (there are more international grad students than international undergrad students in every Faculty except Management). But it would be nice to show you are thinking of them in particular, given that their academic needs are often very different from the academic needs of undergraduates.
Evan Price (platform)
“I believe that experiential learning is the key to students owning their educational experience, while helping to shape conscience citizens of tomorrow.”
I don’t know what a “conscience citizen” is; as far as I know, both of those words are nouns and aren’t typically used together. I understand typos happen, but the whole platform is 100 words. Work with me here. I don’t know if he means “conscientious” 0r <something>-conscious or “citizens with a [social] conscience”, so I can’t really comment.
I will say I disagree with the sweeping statement that experiential learning is a key, period. I can name off the top of my head 10 areas where experience is difficult to obtain and of limited relevance. For example: algorithmics.
“Why don’t we get class credit for volunteering in our community?”
We do. Well, some of us do. I can’t speak for you, but computer science students do.
[I] propose an optional 5% class credit for 10 hrs of volunteer work done in the community using the material of the specific class.
I actually think this idea has promise, with some adjustment. I thought so 5 years ago when I contributed to the establishment of CS Community Outreach course. The problem with the idea expressed in the platform is many (most?) individual classes don’t have a lot of material that can actually contribute to the community, at least not in 10 hours. I’m saying this as a computer scientist, in a world where EVERYONE needs something programmed. The fact is a lot of our courses give us necessary needed knowledge that alone is of little use. So I take a class on Operating Systems, and I learn vital information about scheduling, resource allocation, memory pages, deadlocks, threads, and other cool concepts. In 10 hours, what can I do with this knowledge? Fuck all. If I call the Food Bank and offer to give a seminar on the dining philosophers, they’ll hang up. I can try to contribute to an open-source OS project, but the learning time to do something useful is way more than 10 hours.
That’s why we implemented a whole course. The course integrates 3 years of computing knowledge into a 1- or 2-semester project. We learn new skills (project management, collaborative project/software engineering, requirements analysis, working with customers) and apply a whole set of skills (software engineering, software architecture, programming, web programming, …). We also get the experience of volunteering in our community. The community/non-profit gets a team of 4 or more people working on their project for up to two semesters, which is potentially hundreds of hours of expensive expertise, for free (instead of 4 people showing up and offering them 10 hours of instruction on computer ethics).
It’s also an optional though highly recommended and popular course, and you need instructor permission to take it: we don’t want to send representatives of Dalhousie out to help people who turn out to be useless. We all know these fail-people exist, and allowing/requiring everyone to do it will erase good-will in a hurry. This also solves the evaluation problem – instead of every professor trying to keep track of and evaluate 10 hours of work for every student for every class, we contain it to one class. The quality of the work they produce is graded, so it’s not people just putting in the time: there’s incentive to do it WELL.
• Propose expanding the use of co-curricular transcripts to include many areas of certification,
I assume once these exist, adding items to them is trivial. I’ll say in general every transcript should recognize that time spent with Ed Leach is useful.
• Propose the use of a uniform grading system for all faculties at Dalhousie University.
Oh come on. Not this bullshit again. People have been proposing this “solution” for years, and it’s sucked just as much every time. I’ll try to be brief. 1. Why should I, as a computer science student, care about the marks people are getting in Arts? I’m never going to be compared to them in any context where the people doing the comparison can’t tell the difference. I’ll be compared to other computer science students, from universities across Canada. 2. Uniformity implies equality, and the Faculties of Dalhousie are simply not the same. The way things are marked in Arts is fundamentally different from most of the marking in CS; why would you somehow hack at them both to try to make them the same? 3. Faculties like CS and Engineering and Medicine are responsible to national accreditation boards who don’t care what other Faculties at Dalhousie are doing. 4. Faculties like FGS and Medicine and Law expend great effort to recruit and admit the top undergraduate students from programs like Arts and Science. Why should a set of hand-picked students from Arts, Science, and CS be compared to the entire set of students from Arts, Science, and CS?
I don’t know what problem he thinks he is addressing here, but I’m quite certain this is the wrong solution.
That said, I assumed he meant big-F Faculties, and not little-f faculty. If in fact he was talking about grading faculty members, that’s a whole other issue.
• Propose reopening a 24 hour study space for students.
My issue here is “re-opening”. The only space that has been consistently open to students 24 hours a day is the CS Building. The problem with opening this space to students 24-hours a day is that, by and large, too many students are assholes. I would argue I’ve spent as much or more time on this issue than anyone in the last decade. This included getting the SUB to stay open 24-hours for studying (it was incredibly underused), and later opening the entire fourth floor of the CS building for 24-hour studying. The latter stopped when we found students were destroying the furniture we’d put up there for them – writing on the tables, they actually broke one table in half, ruining carpets, and so forth. And the garbage! Bottles, papers, take-out leftovers… horrendous. Eventually we had to shut that down because we couldn’t afford it. This wasn’t one or two bad students- this was a systematic disrespect for the space. I understand it was similar concerns that led to the closing of the rest of the building, as well. It actually was never that bad except for during exams.
When it was first built, we were actually told that the Killam Learning Commons would soon be open 24-hours as well. My understanding is they looked at the costs involved, and the experience of the CS building, and it never happened. Like it or not, funding is Faculty-specific, and none of that funding is tied to students using “your” building for study space. Yet you still have to pay cleaning, maintenance, security, and repair costs. The more budgets are restricted, the less excited anyone is going to be about opening space for 24 hours. What you need to attain here is University-level support and funding, something the DSU has been pushing for years without success.
So this is an idea popular with students, and he can propose it all he wants, but it’s not getting him anywhere unless he can finish the sentence with more details.
Overall, I appreciate him coming to the table with some ideas and wanting to push the role beyond what we expect of it. In general I support this whole-heartedly, and though I found problems with most of the ideas, I respect bringing them to the table. A lot of good ideas start with a slightly worse idea. My concern is mostly that what we expect of the role (a fierce advocate for students when establishing the MOU, for example) would be neglected as he pounds his head into this new ideas. Innovation is wonderful, but the job comes with responsibilities: I want to know if he is taking the bonus approach, where these things are above and beyond his constitutionally mandated job, or if he is taking the Debogorski approach of saying the job description sucks, I want to go in there and implement all these awesome ideas.
Once again, nothing specific to graduate students.
Karl Dempsey (platform)
1. Academic integrity and plagiarism. Continuing to improve standards and information on plagiarism is needed. A plagiarism awareness day across the campus would be an idea to work upon.
What standards on plagiarism need to be improved? What’s wrong with “don’t do it”? In general I find fault with the notion that if only students were more aware of plagiarism, there would be less of it. Pretty much everyone knows plagiarism is bad, the problem is that people don’t understand how not to plagiarize. Last year on a train from Chicago to Urbana, Illinois, I sat beside a graduate student in engineering and watched him plagiarize. It was fascinating – he didn’t copy and paste anything, but he would read the original document, think for a few minutes, switch to his own document and start typing. He’d make several attempts at a sentence, editing and changing words, trying to get the wording right. When he finished, the final result contained whole phrases and sentences verbatim from the original. An anecdotal story with little evidentiary value, but I have some expertise in the area and I think there’s an important lesson there.
2. Student debt and paying for secondary education needs to continue by working with the provincial and federal government. Average tuition debt needs to come down making secondary education more accessible.
I… sigh. First of all, “secondary education” is high school, which is free in Canada to anyone who wants it, and to plenty of people who don’t. Hurray! Mission Accomplished!
Second, “Student debt… needs to continue by working with the provincial and federal government”? I don’t understand. It’s syntactically weird and semantically vague.
Average debt could certainly come down, but, uh… how do you propose to do this?
3. Students with accessibility issues deserve attention. More money for accessibility bursary fund needs to be increased, 2000.00 per annual is not enough.
I agree entirely. Budget issues aside… Proofreading, do you speak it? I suspect I’m not alone in expecting a 100-word platform from the Vice President (Education) to read like he has an education.
4. Continue to improve students environment.
Indeed. I don’t even know what this means. I’m going to pretend it doesn’t exist.
In conclusion, not a big fan of this platform. No ideas like Price, even less specific than LeForte, incorrect details, awkwardly written… it’s not at the same level. As is apparently the new de facto standard, graduate students were not mentioned. He gets points for mentioning students with accessibility issues who typically are left out of campaign platforms, and then promptly loses them because this fund is in the portfolio of the VP Internal.
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That’s my take. Agree? Disagree? Comments are open.
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