Carleton students have been finding that several months in the 2015-16 Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) agenda are wrong.
The agenda has missing and repeated days in January, February, April, and August in the semester view. Both January and April are missing the 19th of the month, and the 20th is repeated in both in the months of February and August.
The agenda was printed by yearbook company Friesens. CUSA switched to using Friesens’ agendas three years ago, and just renewed their contract, according to CUSA president Fahd Alhattab.
Alhattab said CUSA used to publish their agendas with the Canadian Federation of Students, but switched to Friesens because the cost was cheaper.
According to Friesens customer service representative Rod Dueck, CUSA supplied Friesens with the template files to be used in the agenda.
“The template was submitted to us to use,” Dueck said. “Every one of our clients has a completely different set up for how they want to manage their files and proofing and so forth.”
Friesens’ clients have a lot of control over the process until the files reach the editing stage, Dueck added, and the company from this time on has no control over how their clients check the work.
Since Friesens did not provide the templates, Dueck said there will be no refunds for the errors in the agendas.
According to Alhattab, there were a total of 6,000 agendas ordered this year, at a cost to CUSA of $3.50 each, although the agendas are free for students. About a third of the free agendas were distributed to first-year students in frosh packages, and the remainder given out at the CUSA office.
Last year, CUSA ordered 10,000 agendas but decreased the number this year after many were left unused.
Revenue from the ads in the agendas covered about 70 per cent of the cost of printing, Alhattab said.
Second-year student Manuela Barcenas said she thinks the CUSA agendas are a valuable service for students.
“They are organized in a much better way than they were last year,” she said.
However, she did not notice the errors and neither did first-year student Sam Parsonson.
Parsonson said he was glad to have the agenda but would not have used an agenda if it were not provided in the frosh package.
Alhattab said CUSA designed every aspect of the agenda through their communications office. The changes made to the communications office over the summer, coupled with changes made to the design of the agenda itself, caused difficulties, he said.
While CUSA was aware of the errors, there was nothing they could do to fix them before the deadline, Alhattab said.
“There’s no error that goes out of our office that we don’t notice first,” Alhattab said.
As of two weeks ago, he said CUSA has given out every single agenda.
