All Posts Tagged With: "university of alberta"

Some money repaid

A University of Alberta student allegedly embezzled $27,745 from the Business Students’ Association. Students in the Faculty of Business received an e-mail Monday informing them that it was possible because of a “bank error in setting up the ATM card privileges,” reports the Edmonton Journal. The e-mail also says “a significant portion” of the money has been repaid.

The (surprisingly) most-read stories of 2011

Photo by Kelly Finnamore on Flickr

Each year, we offer Maclean’s On Campus readers a look back at the Top 10 most-read higher education news stories of the year. There were two big themes in 2011. First, the many scandals over universities’ reputations, from Alberta to Queen’s to St. FX. Second, uncertainty about the job market for grads.

1. Time for this year’s edition of X-ring Idol
Our blogging English professor, Todd Pettigrew, dared to compare the obsession of St. Francis Xavier students with their beloved X-ring to Gollum’s unhealthy quest for the precious. We knew St. FX students would defend their tradition vociferously—and they did, with more than 250 comments over three days. Most were from alumni and students who thought Pettigrew missed the point. They argued that the ring symbolizes their hard work and the family-like bond they instantly glean whenever a fellow X-grad catches a glimpse of their band. Then again, dozens of readers agreed with Pettigrew—some even suggested the flood of emotional reactions reinforced his point.

Continue reading The 10 biggest stories in Canadian higher education

The reasons may surprise you

Snowy Edmonton, Alta. by Stella Blu on Flickr

Alberta is as a maverick when it comes to higher education. The province prepares students for post-secondary better than its neighbors, has some of the country’s most satisfied students and punches above its weight in research.

Now there’s even more evidence that the rest of Canada should pay attention to how Wild Rose Country approaches higher education.

New University of Saskatchewan research, which included 12,000 first-year students, found that grades for Albertans tended to drop just 6.4 points from Grade 12, but fell as much as 19.6 points on average for students from another province. In other words, a student from Alberta who graduates with an 86 average is likely to end first-year as an 80 student, while students from that other unnamed province would average 66.

One reason Alberta’s students are much better prepared is that they study long and hard to pass provincial standardized exams, which account for 50 per cent of their Grade 12 marks. Students in other provinces are graded more subjectively, making it easier for teachers to give high marks.

The higher standards are well-known. In recognition of the high standards, the University of British Columbia automatically raises Albertan students’ grades two per cent when they apply.

But it’s a lot more than standardized tests that make Alberta’s schools succed. Here are six more reasons the rest of Canada ought to pay closer attention to Alberta’s higher education system.

1. Public funding of universities is highest in Alberta.
Statistics Canada says that 72 per cent of funding for Alberta universities came from public sources in 2009. The next highest was Newfoundland at 69 per cent. It was only 49 per cent in Nova Scotia.

2. Albertans outperform their peers well before university.
Alberta’s 15-year-olds came second in the world in reading and fourth in the world in science in the 2009 PISA study, the gold-standard international test. Those were the top scores in Canada.

3. Alberta has two teaching-focused universities that work.
Grant MacEwan and Mount Royal Univeristy have faculty who spend most of their days teaching, rather than conducting research—unlike nearly every university east of Edmonton. And both institutions score exceptionally well on the National Survey of Student Engagement. When asked “if you could start over, would go to the institution you are now attending?,” 50 per cent of Mount Royal seniors and 60 per cent of Grant MacEwan seniors said yes. The average is just 45 per cent.

5. Alberta’s transfer system works.
In Sept. 2009, nearly 12,000 post-secondary students transferred between schools in the province. Many of the transfers are from the provinces’ teaching-focused institutions and community colleges into big research institutions. Harvey Weingarten, then-president of the University of Calgary, told the authors of Academic Reform that transfer students are “academically indistinguishable.”

6. Even with teaching-focused universities, Alberta remains a research leader.
Despite having more students in teaching-only institutions and only 11 per cent of Canada’s population, Alberta holds 17 per cent of the Canada Excellence Research Chairs, which come with up to $10-million apiece. Alberta also has 12 per cent of the prestigious Vanier Scholarships. The University of Alberta has the second highest per-faculty research funding in Canada at $309,332.

Star academics get light punishments for lifting ideas

Photo by John Ulan Epic Photography Inc.

From the 21st Maclean’s University Rankings—on newsstands now. Story by Charlie Gillis.

Every university has them—prize-winning researchers, or profs who routinely get their faces on the late-night news. “Celebrity academics” are typically figures for a school to extol, but the reigning newsmaker at the University of Alberta won’t be gracing this year’s alumni brochures. Formerly the dean of U of A’s medical school, Philip Baker is now best known as the guy who plagiarized tracts of an address to graduates from an article he’d read in The New Yorker magazine. Baker lost his administrative position following an internal investigation. But he kept his job as a professor, and was expected back on campus in October.

Continue reading When professors plagiarize

Expert says eastern schools are losing research race

Edmonton skyline by Bulliver on Flickr

“The intellectual centre of gravity of Canada is shifting west much faster than people realize,” Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates has told The Ottawa Citizen.

“Twenty years ago, you could have made a case that three or four of the top seven or eight universities in the country were in Ontario. I don’t think you could make that claim today,” he said.

Western schools are getting more highly prized funding, says Usher. For example, the federal government offered four of its 19 new $10-million Canada Excellence Research Chairs to the University of Alberta, while Toronto and Waterloo got two each and Ottawa got one.

Although Vanier Scholarships are much smaller at $150,000 each, it’s worth noting that no region dominated that contest. The University of Toronto, McGill University and the University of British Columbia earned 29, 25 and 25 respectively. The University of Alberta got 11.

It’s also worth noting that Usher’s comments come just three days before the provincial election in Ontario, but he is not endorsing any party. None of the three major parties has promised more core funding for post-secondary education, which he said is akin to a freeze over the next four years.

“I am bleak about Ontario,” he said. “This is what happens when you have a $15-billion deficit.”

HESA is a Toronto firm that conducts post-secondary data collection and strategic development.

After human rights complaint, profs don’t want to supervise him

Photo courtesy of Aaron Yeo

A graduate student at the University of Alberta is going to desperate measures in a bid to find a new graduate supervisor.

Salah Rahmani, who was asked to leave the Department of Cell Biology — which he filed a human rights complaint against earlier this year — is on a hunger strike because he says no one in his new department, Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, is willing to supervise him.

“[Professors] are not co-operating. Some of them told me, ‘we don’t have space,’ or ‘we don’t have funding’,” he told The Gateway newspaper from the tent outside the university’s student union building where he has supposedly been living food-free since June 27. He alleges that fellow students got responses from professors about potentially supervising them, while he heard nothing back from those same professors.

On a blog set up to defend Rahmani, it is written that in a meeting with administrators on May 11, 2010: “Psychologist, Dr. Lorraine Breault who was their [sic] friend told that the chair can make any decision. Salah’s understanding was that this was absolutely wrong.” That meeting was set up after he accused a professor of likening him to a dog and saying he was too old to be a student. (Those are similar allegations to those he eventually made in January, 2011 human rights complaint.)

Rene Poliquin, vice-dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, said the faculty is concerned for Rahmani’s health and they are working to find a solution to his issue.

More than 20 supporters have left comments on the Help Salah Rahmani blog.

Trains muscles and competes to get insider’s perspective

Photo courtesy of roonb on Flickr

A University of Alberta professor went undercover to understand the women’s body-builder psyche by becoming a body-builder herself. After competing in the Northern Alberta Bodybuilding Competition on June 4 — complete with purple bikini, blond hair extensions, fake nails, four-inch heels and a spray tan — she revealed herself to her surprised colleagues, reports to the Edmonton Journal.

Lianne McTavish is a feminist and teacher of the history of art, design and visual culture who has written about women’s bodies throughout history and across cultures. During her past year of training, she wrote about the experience of body building on a blog using the pseudonym Feminist Figure Girl under the headline Look hot while you fight the patriarchy. That blog will form the basis of a new book she plans to write a book.

McTavish told the Journal that she feels out of shape since the “ritualized test” of the competition, but she doesn’t miss the hardcore dieting. She says she would wake up famished around five in the morning and would have trouble concentrating on her academic work because of the hunger. Planning and consuming her six small meals per day consumed up to 30 hours of her week, she says.

But it wasn’t all pain. She also felt a strong sense of accomplishment from preparing and competing. She also found that the local bodybuilders were very welcoming and supportive.

Colleague Anne Whitelaw told the Journal that she is intrigued by what this means for feminist scholarship. ”[McTavish] values the work that other women are doing and have done to participate in this competition,” she said. “I appreciate the seriousness [of that], because I think it would be very easy, from a feminist standpoint, to just dismiss it as adopting and perpetuating a stereotype.”

Although McTavish won’t compete again, she does hope to become a volunteer trainer for women at a local shelter, who might benefit from the same type of sense of accomplishment that she felt.

Would you trust your cancer diagnosis to someone who had cheated on an exam?

This morning, the news broke that on Friday, Philip Baker, Dean of The Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry* at the University of Alberta, delivered a speech that was largely plagiarized from a speech given by Atwul Gawande last year at Stanford. Baker has issued an apology, but an apology is not good enough. He should resign immediately, and here’s why.

1. On principle. As Dean, Baker is responsible for the academic integrity of the programs he oversees. Deans are called upon every day to make decisions that impact students and faculty in the most basic ways: hirings, promotions, sabbaticals, grade appeals — it’s hard to think of an important university function that does not involve deans. Baker made a mistake, and he may feel bad about it, but he cannot now be trusted with the grades of students and the careers of faculty.

2. It sets an impossibly bad example. How can the university enforce its rules about plagiarism (for which students can be expelled according to U of  A policies) when one of its own deans has admitted to plagiarism himself? What could a faculty member say to an offending student who points out that what he has done is no different from what his own dean has done? Is a professor of obstetrics supposed to look a student in the eye and say that students have to be held to higher standards than university officials?

3. The scandal may hurt students, the integrity of whose degree might be called into question.

4. “What I stole was really good” is no excuse. According to the Edmonton Journal, Baker’s apology suggested that while he did lift the content of the Gawande speech, it was only because the original oration “inspired me and resonated with my experiences[...] The personal medical traumas which I detailed were wholly genuine and did indeed engender the sense of inadequacy I highlighted.”

Such an excuse, though, is no excuse at all. For one thing, there are well-established ways of using the words of another in an ethical way: paraphrasing and quoting with attribution. If the Gawande speech was so inspiring, all Dean Baker had to do was say, “In thinking about my address today, I recalled a wonderful speech delivered at Stanford last year, in which Dr. Atwul Gawande said…” and so on. Why didn’t Baker do that? Because according to witnesses who read compared the two addresses,  Baker lifted almost the whole thing, and to admit to that would be to look like you hadn’t written your own speech. Which, of course, he hadn’t. So he passed off a counterfeit.

But to do so at a university event, in his capacity as Dean, is to show a shocking disregard for a basic principle of academic integrity: you don’t knowingly take credit for someone else’s work.

Baker’s programs are in obstetrics and gynecology. Would you want your baby delivered by a doctor who hadn’t written her own papers? Ask yourself: would you want your cervical cancer diagnosed by someone who cheated on their oncology exam?

*This post originally referred to Dean Baker with an incorrect title. It has been corrected.

This 3M winner has a unique talent for attracting students to oncology

In 1986, to recognize the importance of university teaching, the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and 3M Canada created the 3M National Teaching Fellowships. Ten university faculty members are recognized each year for their educational leadership and exceptional contributions to teaching. Here we continue our series profiling all 10 of the 2011 3M Teaching Award winners, with a look at Scott North, an oncology professor at the University of Alberta.

One of the worst mistakes a professor can make is “overteaching the topic,” says University of Alberta oncology professor Scott North. Many professors “teach to a level of detail that is much above what the average person needs to know and in so doing . . . they turn [students] off.” The critical skill for teachers is to know when “less is more.”

North favours comparing his own approach to a tree. “There are branches which are concepts and there are leaves which are detailed information.” The same way trees shed and renew their leaves every year, details are always in flux. “The branches, or concepts, remain present,” he says. “Teach the student the fundamentals and you will provide them the tools to find out the details.”

Recalling that during medical school he wasn’t particularly interested in oncology—only choosing his specialization during his residency­—North takes great care to emphasize to his students that he is not trying to turn them all into oncologists. He points out that nearly everyone has been affected by cancer, and that his goal is to help students become well-rounded doctors with a firm understanding of how to “work with cancer patients in a way that improves the doctor/patient relationship.”

While it might be fashionable for educators today to dismiss the lecture format as outdated, North recognizes that lectures are “still useful teaching vehicles” that “are efficient when trying to get information across to a large number of learners.” At the same time he does his best to pepper his lectures with humour and anecdotes.

Practical teaching methods also feature heavily in North’s classrooms. He brings in patients to discuss their illnesses, and regularly enlists actors so that medical students can practice diagnosing patients, hone their bedside manner, and learn how to deliver bad news. As he teaches students during the pre-clinical part of their degree, such experience is invaluable.

“This helps to introduce skills and topics that might be either emotionally difficult or uncomfortable to students so they can experience it and learn before having to do it on real patients,” he says.

Shaun Loewen, a radiation oncology resident, who took a course with North in 2004, says his classic undersell of oncology as a career, North’s skills as a lecturer, and his desire to fully prepare students to enter clinical training are what led him to become an oncologist himself: “I view my experiences in Professor North’s oncology course as the seminal event that pointed me towards a career in oncology.”

Mice spotted in Tory Building by graduate students and staff

As if coming back from reading week wasn’t bad enough: students and staff at the University of Alberta now have to contend with one of the worst mice infestations on campus in recent history.

According to campus paper The Gateway, graduate students and staff have witnessed mice eating left-over food and have found waste left behind by the critters in the offices of the Tory Building. Ray Dumouchel, Associate Director of Building and Grounds Service, told The Gateway that the infestation is the worst he’s seen at the U of A:

“It’s not just in Tory; it’s an issue that’s happening not just here on campus but across the city [ ... ],” Dumouchel said, though he said he couldn’t explain why the mice population was so much larger this year than in the past. “We’re trying to control it throughout the campus, but it is something that, talking to our pest control company that does all the work here, is a large problem across the city.”

Baiting stations have been set up in the lower floors of the Tory Building, and while offices in the building are typically only cleaned once every two weeks, Dumouchel said that if mice are spotted, the office will be cleaned daily till the mice are gone. He is also asking students and staff to keep their offices tidy and crumb-free, requesting that all food be kept sealed for the time being.