Archive for May, 2010
Program helped develop skills to use computers
B.C. Diploma, Associate Degree, and Certificate Student Outcomes Survey
Score: A higher value indicates a more favourable rating.
Institution as % of B.C. Average: To allow for a more accurate and fair comparison among different types of institutions, the DACSO survey takes the scores from the left-hand column and adjusts them to account for the different program mixes at each school. Each school’s percentage result shows how it would have placed if all institutions in the survey had its program mix. One hundred percent equals the provincial adjusted score; 101% is 1% above the provincial adjusted score; 99% is 1% below.
Program helped to develop skills to use mathematics
B.C. Diploma, Associate Degree, and Certificate Student Outcomes Survey
Score: A higher value indicates a more favourable rating.
Institution as % of B.C. Average: To allow for a more accurate and fair comparison among different types of institutions, the DACSO survey takes the scores from the left-hand column and adjusts them to account for the different program mixes at each school. Each school’s percentage result shows how it would have placed if all institutions in the survey had its program mix. One hundred percent equals the provincial adjusted score; 101% is 1% above the provincial adjusted score; 99% is 1% below.
Program helped develop skills to resolve issues or problems
B.C. Diploma, Associate Degree, and Certificate Student Outcomes Survey
Score: A higher value indicates a more favourable rating.
Institution as % of B.C. Average: To allow for a more accurate and fair comparison among different types of institutions, the DACSO survey takes the scores from the left-hand column and adjusts them to account for the different program mixes at each school. Each school’s percentage result shows how it would have placed if all institutions in the survey had its program mix. One hundred percent equals the provincial adjusted score; 101% is 1% above the provincial adjusted score; 99% is 1% below.
Program helped develop skills to analyze and think critically
B.C. Diploma, Associate Degree, and Certificate Student Outcomes Survey
Score: A higher value indicates a more favourable rating.
Institution as % of B.C. Average: To allow for a more accurate and fair comparison among different types of institutions, the DACSO survey takes the scores from the left-hand column and adjusts them to account for the different program mixes at each school. Each school’s percentage result shows how it would have placed if all institutions in the survey had its program mix. One hundred percent equals the provincial adjusted score; 101% is 1% above the provincial adjusted score; 99% is 1% below.
Program helped develop skills to work effectively with others
B.C. Diploma, Associate Degree, and Certificate Student Outcomes Survey
Score: A higher value indicates a more favourable rating.
Institution as % of B.C. Average: To allow for a more accurate and fair comparison among different types of institutions, the DACSO survey takes the scores from the left-hand column and adjusts them to account for the different program mixes at each school. Each school’s percentage result shows how it would have placed if all institutions in the survey had its program mix. One hundred percent equals the provincial adjusted score; 101% is 1% above the provincial adjusted score; 99% is 1% below.
Program helped develop skills to speak effectively
B.C. Diploma, Associate Degree, and Certificate Student Outcomes Survey
Score: A higher value indicates a more favourable rating.
Institution as % of B.C. Average: To allow for a more accurate and fair comparison among different types of institutions, the DACSO survey takes the scores from the left-hand column and adjusts them to account for the different program mixes at each school. Each school’s percentage result shows how it would have placed if all institutions in the survey had its program mix. One hundred percent equals the provincial adjusted score; 101% is 1% above the provincial adjusted score; 99% is 1% below.
Program helped develop skills to write clearly and concisely
B.C. Diploma, Associate Degree, and Certificate Student Outcomes Survey
Score: A higher value indicates a more favourable rating.
Institution as % of B.C. Average: To allow for a more accurate and fair comparison among different types of institutions, the DACSO survey takes the scores from the left-hand column and adjusts them to account for the different program mixes at each school. Each school’s percentage result shows how it would have placed if all institutions in the survey had its program mix. One hundred percent equals the provincial adjusted score; 101% is 1% above the provincial adjusted score; 99% is 1% below.
Graduate employment rate
Ontario Colleges Key Performance Indicators Survey
Survey of 2008-2009 graduates six months after graduation
Source: Colleges Ontario
Employer satisfaction rate
Ontario Colleges Key Performance Indicators Survey
Employers who hired 2008-2009 college graduates were asked how well they felt the college had prepared its graduates to meet their needs as an employer. They were not asked to evaluate the graduate.
Source: Colleges Ontario
Student satisfaction: quality of facilities/resources
Ontario Colleges Key Performance Indicators Survey
How satisfied are you with the overall quality of the facilities/resources in the college?
Source: Colleges Ontario
Graduate satisfaction rate
Ontario Colleges Key Performance Indicators Survey
Six months after graduation, respondents were asked how satisfied they were with the usefulness of their college education in achieving goals after graduation.
Source: Colleges Ontario
Graduation rate
Ontario Colleges Key Performance Indicators Survey
The 2009-2010 Key Performance Indicators Graduation Rate is based on students who started one-year programs in 2007-2008, two-year programs in 2005-2006 and three-year programs in 2003-2004, who went on to graduate by 2008-2009.
Source: Colleges Ontario
Student satisfaction: usefulness of knowledge and skills
Ontario Colleges Key Performance Indicators Survey
How satisfied are you that, overall, your program is giving you knowledge and skills that will be useful in your future career?
Student satisfaction: quality of learning experiences
Ontario Colleges Key Performance Indicators Survey
How satisfied are you with the overall quality of the learning experiences in this program?
Source: Colleges Ontario
Student satisfaction: quality of services
Ontario Colleges Key Performance Indicators Survey
How satisfied are you with the overall quality of the services in the college?
Source: Colleges Ontario
Student satisfaction rate
Ontario Colleges Key Performance Indicators Survey
This table represents the average of four capstone questions on student satisfaction relating to issues of resources, services and the learning experience.
Source: Colleges Ontario
For the love of humanities
The liberal arts can be invaluable when students are encouraged to think critically
“Humanities”
Just saying the word makes my coffee-pouring hand start to tingle.
But are we history/philosophy/literature buffs really destined for a life behind the counter at Starbucks? Is the inherent value of a soft science subject essential to the holistic self? Or has post-secondary ideological warfare destroyed any worth to be found in Sociology 101?
Those seem to be the questions on the public mind these days. Paul Wells from Maclean’s and Margaret Wente from the Globe and Mail both printed pieces on the value of the liberal arts course a few weeks ago. (Note: all further references to “liberal arts” should be accompanied by a hissing sound.) They’re interesting reads, with starkly opposing views. You can check them out here and here if you want, but I’ll summarize below.
Wells’ “In Praise of the Squishy Subjects,” which was originally written for the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation, emphasizes the value of soft sciences. He uses examples to show how funding research in fields like criminology and sociology can offer economical return, though that’s not really his main point. After all, “No social scientist can win a fight for scarce funds if the debate is framed in terms of return on investment,” Wells writes, “because nobody who will make the investment will be able to tear their gaze away from the competition’s lab coats and microscopes.”
Instead, emphasizes Wells, the value of a “squishy subject” is in its ability to evoke critical thinking.
If you spend a few years wrestling with the idea of society as propounded by Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Rousseau and Marx, you come away with a better understanding of all the alternative ways our own society might choose to configure itself, with their attendant risks.
[. . .]
This sort of study instills in the student an appreciation for the richness of our human enterprise. It shows that the way we live is not the way we have always lived, nor is it the way everyone lives. It demonstrates the role of ideas and the possibility of massive change.
You never know what you’ll need to know, Wells points out. And if you’ve studied the ambiguities of the social sciences, you’ll be a lot more comfortable making connections, accepting the possibility of multiple answers, and thinking outside the box.
But ask Camille Paglia about the value of the contemporary social science course and you’ll get a totally different answer. Paglia, a social critic and professor of Humanities and Media Studies at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, was interviewed by Margaret Wente for her article “A landscape of death in the humanities.” In the Q&A piece, Paglia argues that the current trend toward hyperfocused humanities courses (Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, etc.) has eroded the overall purpose of higher education, which, she says, is to provide a broad overview and foundation for learning. She says:
I’ve met fundamentalist Protestants who’ve just come out of high school and read the Bible. They have a longer view of history than most students who come out of Harvard. The problem today is that professors feel they are far too sophisticated and important to do something as mundane as teach a foundation course.
[. . .]
But instead of that, the kids get ideology. They’re taught that global warming has been caused by factories. They have no idea there’s been climate change throughout history. And they’re scared into thinking that tsunamis are coming to drown New York.
New feature: ask a professor
Everything you wanted to know about professors but had more important things to do than ask.
An academic year has come and gone and the hour hand has almost moved from midnight to one. I was somewhat astounded to realize recently that I have written 54 posts since I began this blog last August.
Throughout, I have tried to give the prof’s-eye-view of university life, often trying to anticipate what those outside of the academy, or those who only know it as students, might find interesting. I will continue to do so and to provide the commentary on current events that have endeared me to so many.
Still, as The Hour Hand moves on, I would love to hear from readers directly about what questions they might have and about which they would like a frank response. I will work out the rules as I go along, but a few occur to me off-hand:
1. Don’t ask me to do your homework. I won’t explain the difference between accuracy and precision or tell you how much Gertrude knew about the murder of King Hamlet.
2. Don’t ask me to take sides. Please don’t send me things like “My prof said I plagiarized, but I don’t think I did” with the hope that I will say you are right so that you can throw it in your prof’s face (it wouldn’t work anyway).
3. I can’t provide course or career counseling. I have no way of knowing what courses you need to get into a particular program, or what courses you should take when you get there, or what the job prospects are when you graduate. These are all good questions, but not ones I know the answers to.
4. Don’t ask about things that are specific to your university. I don’t know the hours of the pharmacy in your student centre or what time the Dean usually gets in.
5. Please remember that I am not a medical doctor or trained psychologist. Questions about health problems or serious emotional crises should be referred to qualified professionals.
I hope that leaves a few stones for us to turn. By the way, while I may address your question in the blog, I will not use your name or any of your personal information.
Send emails to todd_pettigrew@cbu.ca . Please put the words “Hour Hand” in the subject line.
UVic plans to ‘cull’ rabbits on campus
Aims to create ‘rabbit-free zone’ around the university by trapping and euthanizing the animals
The faculty feud
Inside the nasty battle at McMaster’s business school
Faculty members at McMaster University’s DeGroote School of Business in Hamilton are fond of telling a story about a student who, several years ago, interrupted a professor mid-lesson with a question about something in his organizational behaviour textbook. The student had flipped ahead to chapter four and spotted a case study about an ugly battle between employees at Charles Schwab Canada and the company’s chief executive, Paul Bates. The page featured a large photo of Bates leaning over an employee’s cubicle in the middle of the discount brokerage’s Toronto offices. The student immediately recognized the face of the school’s head administrator and asked, “Hey, isn’t that the dean?”
Indeed it was. The case study, based on a 2002 Financial Post column headlined “Slick salesmanship masked discontent,” blamed Bates for the revolt at the discount brokerage—a dozen employees sent a letter to Charles Schwab’s head office warning that management of the Canadian arm was “no longer acting in the best interest of ourselves or our clients”—and suggested Bates should have been fired as a result (instead, he oversaw the sale of the brokerage firm to Scotiabank). Bates, who declined to be interviewed for this story despite repeated requests by Maclean’s, was named dean of McMaster’s business school two years later.
The revelation about Bates’s tumultuous history with Charles Schwab, and the fact it was featured in a business textbook, was awkward, to say the least. It also left several DeGroote faculty members, who had already been chafing against Bates’s leadership, with a feeling that history was about to repeat itself. They were right. DeGroote is currently being roiled by its own nasty internal divisions, with Bates again being fingered as the bad guy. In the ivory tower equivalent of a mutiny, several faculty members are speaking out against what they describe as Bates’s harsh, top-down management style. They accuse him of running the school like a corporation—not an institution of higher learning—and of bullying professors who don’t fall in line.
Facing mounting complaints, the university’s office of human rights and equity services launched an investigation and released a preliminary report in March. The publicly available report is based on interviews with Bates and 26 faculty members, as well as an examination of internal documents, postings and emails, but does not attempt to determine whether there has actually been any wrongdoing. It paints a picture of a school deeply divided—“an underlying and pervasive culture of hostility has emerged”—and lists a litany of allegations against Bates, all of them unproven, including complaints that he has run roughshod over established rules and procedures and has shown little interest in the school’s academic mission. The internal divisions have created a “dysfunctional work environment” that threatens to further deteriorate if left unchecked, according to the report, with both sides hurling allegations of harassment and discrimination.
Some faculty members say the situation has become so bad they are seriously considering leaving the school, despite their tenure.
McMaster’s response was to dust off the wheels of university bureaucracy. Under the umbrella of the university’s anti-discrimination and group conflict policies, it has assembled a three-member committee to “provide guidance” to the business school and oversee a series of investigations and mediation, as well as anti-discrimination and harassment training. The hope, presumably, is to smooth over the dispute before it does lasting damage to DeGroote’s reputation as an up-and-coming business school and casts a pall over the opening of a new, $27-million DeGroote facility in nearby Burlington, Ont., this fall. But faculty members aren’t holding their breath.
The choice of Bates to lead DeGroote raised more than a few eyebrows in early 2004. Unlike the outgoing dean, Vishwanath Baba, a Ph.D., Bates had little in the way of academic credentials. In fact, he didn’t even have a university degree. What he has is business experience. Bates reportedly got his start as a bank teller in Britain before moving to Canada in the early 1970s. He went on to head up four major brokerage firms and has sat on the boards of the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Canadian Investment Dealers Association, and has served as a part-time commissioner in the Ontario Securities Commission.
The Bay Street background, coupled with some part-time teaching experience at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, was presumably a major selling point for McMaster’s administration, who were keen on raising DeGroote’s profile and forging better links with the business community, a key source of funding for the school. Besides, it’s not unusual for business schools to tap non-academics for such positions.
In addition to fundraising, a dean who boasts accomplishments in the private sector helps attract students who value ties to the “real world.” It also helps lure those already working via pricey executive M.B.A. programs, a major cash cow for business schools. In this capacity, Bates would appear to be a perfect choice. With his short, greying beard and closely shaved hair, he is described by his former employees as a “master salesman,” the sort of person who can whip up excitement about a project or cause. He is also a natural with the media (he once hosted a call-in radio show), capable of talking knowledgeably about everything from interest rates to the pharmaceutical industry.
