In Other Schools
January 23, 2007
Atlantic universities fishing for Western students
EDMONTON (CUP) – In order to meet enrolment numbers and keep out of financial trouble, East Coast universities are trying to recruit more high school graduates from Western Canada.
These efforts stem from the fact that there are fewer youth living in the Eastern provinces, said Scott Roberts, the senior director of communications and public affairs at Nova Scotia’s Acadia University.
Although University of Alberta Vice President Carl Amrhein isn’t surprised with the East Coast universities’ efforts to fill their institutions, he is concerned about the intensity with which they are recruiting students from Western Canada.
To entice potential students. For example, Acadia has offered students admission without official transcripts and the University of New Brunswick has offered tuition fee rebates.
East Coast schools may be in luck, though, as crowded faculties and inadequate capacity in the booming province of Alberta may push top students to study outside of the province. He is convinced that “the system in Alberta needs to be increased at all levels to retain students.”
Exam leak causes kerfuffle
VANCOUVER (CUP) – A dilemma faced hundreds of students at the University of British Columbia late last semester when the answers to a second-year biology exam were released online.
James Berger, professor of Biology 200 at UBC, accidentally released the exam key before 1,170 students registered in the five-section course had taken the final exam.
The answers were made available online and accessed by many. The problem was heightened because students were allowed to bring notes to the final.
A student alerted Berger to the accident on Dec. 6 – the day of the exam.
The courses’ instructors, coordinator Ellen Rosenberg, and Paul Harrison, Associate Dean of Science, have worked for the past few weeks to determine the fairest possible grading solutions for the students.
According to Rosenberg, there was a multitude of choices given to students, including accepting their term mark as their final course mark or rewriting the exam in January. Other students had the option of using their final exam mark towards 50 per cent of their final grade. There were 183 students who chose to rewrite the exam on Jan. 10.
Harrison said that making all students write a new exam was not in their best interests.
“To make every student write a new exam was for a number of students . . . the worst outcome because they would have to study when they were starting new courses,” he said. “It was not a preferred option.”
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