Thousand of students in Montreal are now facing overburdened semesters to make up for time lost during the tuition hike protests, according to a Quebec student union spokesperson.
Students who boycotted classes last winter now have to attend intensive makeup sessions, said Ludvic Moquin-Beaudry, a representative of Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ), an association that wants to freeze tuition fees.
Many of her classmates are feeling overwhelmed, said Elisabeth Baril, an environmental design student in her second year at the Université du Quebec à Montréal.
Baril said the school had to compress 11 weeks of class into three weeks, which meant her course load was double what it was last year.
“We know we didn’t learn everything we could have,” she said.
Her department is part of the arts faculty, which was “one of the most radical” at UQAM, and started protesting the tuition hike in February.
Many of the students who did not want to support the movement but could not go to classes because their faculty voted in favour of the strike are really angry, she said.
Twenty-seven thousand UQAM students out of 40,000 in total are taking make-up sessions this fall, according to the Montreal Gazette. At the Université de Montréal, there are 9,000 of 45,000 students taking makeup sessions, said Mathieu Filion, a spokesperson for the university.
“The people most touched are the professors and the teaching assistants,” he said in French. “Since the session was so much shorter, they had much less time to correct and hand back assignments.”
He said the university has extended the hours of its student help office for students who have trouble managing their schedules.
In March 2011, Quebec’s minister of finance Raymond Bachand announced the province would raise tuition fees by $325 a year. The planned increases would have brought tuition to $3,793 by 2017.
In his speech, Bachand said Quebec has the lowest tuition rates in Canada, and the hike would have brought it closer to the rest of the country.
To protest the hike, students organized a series of sit-ins and blockades in Montreal and Quebec City, culminating in a class boycott that lasted from February until September.
Newly-elected Quebec premier Pauline Marois repealed the proposed hike in September.
The punishing academic semester could have been avoided if the provincial government had listened to students in the first place, Moquin-Beaudry said.
“We denounce the way the semester was organized,” he said in French. “Students were under enormous pressure, often they had several evaluations in the same day, or several assignments due the same week. That is far from helpful to those who want to learn.”
“It seems to me, it would have been possible to be a little more flexible, to give students an extra week or two.”
Baril said she is very happy with how her university handled the situation.
“UQAM kept pushing back the start of the semester for those who were behind because they protested. Oct. 1 was the first day of the fall semester; it’s usually the first week of September. I know other schools didn’t do that,” she said.
UQAM’s fall semester has just begun and will compress 15 weeks of work into 12 weeks.
Baril said her workload is very intense, but “her teachers are very understanding about it.”
She also said the jam-packed schedules are a small price to pay for getting the government to repeal the tuition hike.
“Last year was one of the most interesting, stimulating times of my life. I learnt so much about politics and society. I don’t see it as a loss,” she said.
