The Carleton Student Engineering Society (CSES) released an open letter to Carleton president Benoit-Antoine Bacon on Jan. 21 calling for the university to amend school policy to ensure students’ well-being.
The letter said engineering students are struggling to meet unreasonable expectations from professors. An accompanying petition calling for action has more than 800 signatures.
“Engineering in general always has a pretty big workload,” said Logan McFadden, a fifth-year aerospace engineering student and president of CSES.
“With online learning, the amount that we are expected to do has increased because a lot of professors have been told that in order to engage their students they need to provide more opportunities,” McFadden said.
McFadden said students taking five or six courses could have workloads of up to 50 hours a week.
He also said professors either expect students to complete unreasonable amounts of work or do not provide enough learning materials.
“There’s a frustration and a lack of consistency,” McFadden said. “There’s either profs that will give extra lectures and extra readings on top of the three hours of lectures that we have a week, and then there’s also profs that will just give a PDF of whatever we’re supposed to learn and call it a day.”
Tim Speyer, a second-year aerospace engineering student, said he has up to 16 hours of work a week for each of his fluid mechanics and solid mechanics classes.
For one class, Speyer said he is expected to watch two pre-recorded lectures each week in addition to three hours of live lectures and a three-hour tutorial. Speyer is also expected to study and complete practice problems.
“That was literally impossible to do,” Speyer said.
Matt Gagné, president of the Carleton Academic Student Government (CASG) and president-elect of the Carleton University Students’ Association, said he received complaints from students about workload.
“There’s some students that have to do 35-plus hours of studies per week,” he said, “on top of having to put food on the table with whatever part-time job they have, and having to get a good night’s sleep.”
Struggles with course delivery
Guy Morgenshtern, a second-year software engineering student, said he has been tested on material he hadn’t been taught yet on multiple occasions in his ELEC 2501: Circuits and Signals class.
Morgenshtern said at one point, he learned material one week after he was tested on it in a lab.
Other ELEC 2501 students said they found it hard to focus on the material because, in the background of pre-recorded lectures, a cuckoo clock would go off every 10 minutes.
Avery Lynn Stinson, a second-year biomedical and mechanical engineering student, said her slow internet connection has made online learning more difficult.
Stinson said she lives in a rural area and has two brothers doing online learning at the same time as her.
“I had a hard time actually listening to the lectures,” Stinson said. “I could only go over the slides … It’s very frustrating, especially if you have a course where you actually have to be there on a Zoom lesson.”
Speyer said the stress of his classes this semester prompted him to move back in with his family for the sake of his mental health.
“You feel super alone because there’s no one around you,” he said. “You have no idea where you stand … You have no idea if you need to be putting extra time into that because you’re behind everyone else, or if it’s all equally as confusing.”
Trouble with exams
McFadden said some students were penalized because slow connections prevented them from uploading exams by the due time.
According to McFadden, many professors provided an extra half hour after the exam period for students to upload any materials.
However, other professors strictly enforced the exam time and wouldn’t allow exams uploaded “even 30 seconds late, due to technical issues,” McFadden said.
Students took issue with their exams being sequential, meaning questions must be completed in order and can’t be returned to after being completed.
“It’s an anti-cheating device … so that students can’t compare notes and then go back and change their answer,” McFadden said. “However, the problem with that is that a lot of students write exams in a very unique way, and everyone has their own style.”
McFadden said some students will skip over questions they are unsure of to maximize the number of questions they can answer.
Students in ELEC 2501 in the fall semester said they were hit so hard by the final exam that the university held a recovery exam for students who failed the class on Jan. 30.
In an email to students seen by the Charlatan, faculty dean Larry Kostiuk and department of electronics chair Niall Tait said the department was “uncomfortable with approving these grades as presented” and would allow students to take the recovery exam as a “pilot process.”
Owen Van Dusen, a second-year software engineering student, said the time limit for the original exam was a major issue. The exam had eight questions and allowed students 90 minutes for completion, compared to three simpler questions completed over 50 minutes for typical quizzes, Van Dusen said.
Cassidy Pacada, a second-year software engineering student, said having to retake the ELEC 2501 exam took a mental toll because she had to study for the exam while having other assignments due.
“It’s exhausting, because we studied for the final and then we failed,” Pacada said. “I can barely work on [other assignments] because I have to study for this final, and now that makes me super behind in school.”
Dorothy Tran, also a second-year software engineering student, echoed Pacada’s concerns.
“I hope I pass. If I don’t pass, I lose everything,” she said. “We’re not bad students, we just screwed up that course. We could lose our scholarships, and if we get a co-op placement, [we] would have to take that course while working as well.”
Student government takes action
McFadden said he hopes the open letter and petition will result in lasting change to online school.
“The goal with this petition is to show the university … that this is an issue that a lot of students feel strongly about,” he said.
The engineering society’s letter calls for amendments to the collective agreement between the university and the Carleton University Academic Staff Association (CUASA). CSES said it will bring motions to the university senate to amend the agreement.
Kathleen Weary, president of CUSA, said the association will advocate alongside CASG and the Rideau River Residence Association for the changes engineering students want to see.
In an interview with the Charlatan, Weary said she meets regularly with the vice-president (students and enrolment) and the university registrar and will push for the engineering society’s demands in those meetings.
“The goal would be to have more accountability for professors,” Weary said. “The process for changing is quite complex. You have to meet with their union and make changes to the collective agreement, but all things are possible.”
Gagné also said he would advocate to reform the way that online school is run in the coming year.
“[We’ll] make sure that going into September, if it is online, that we’re fully prepared to deal with these issues,” he said.
In an email to the Charlatan, Carleton media relations officer Steven Reid said the university has engaged in an “active dialogue” with student government.
“The past 10 months have brought unprecedented challenges and we appreciate students and other stakeholders voicing their concerns,” Reid said. “The well-being and success of our students has been, and remains, our top priority.”
Reid said the university demonstrated it could deliver a full semester online in the fall but is always looking to improve.
