Daily Bulletin

University of Waterloo • Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Monday, February 9, 1998

Graphics starts an 'exam bank'
All work and no, uh, work
What's happening today: ethics forum
The talk of the campus (library budget, Stanford rains)

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Graphics starts an 'exam bank'

Faculty members have been invited to give copies of old examinations to UW's graphic services department, which will post them on the Web in an "exam bank" and print copies for students for a small charge.

"Security is of the utmost importance," says Colette Nevin of graphics, stressing that exams won't be included in the "bank" without the specific permission of the professor who wrote them. "Faculty should not worry their integrity or pedagogical ideals will be violated."

She explains what the exam bank is all about:

You may use your examinations or parts of them each year, in which case we understand if you do not participate. However it is common knowledge among students that some exams are used year after year. They find sources for these exams, even without exam banks in place, so many faculty members now re-write exams every year. We encourage you to support this resource for students by submitting all your previous examination papers. We will post only the examination papers offered as general circulation for student use. . . .
We want to provide a resource that is easily accessible to the student while providing the examination in an original clean state. Many other examination banks in effect at the University of Waterloo include examinations with hand written comments or answers (often wrong) from other students. These exams are sometimes obtained in an impure state from unlikely sources, impeding the genuine research aspects of studying for upcoming examinations. Graphics believes it is time for a more organized venture.

Letters inviting professors to put their exams in the bank were delivered late last week, and Nevin said Friday that response had already been "tremendous". Once the exam bank is ready to go, there will be an announcement.

All work and no, uh, work

From a report to the senate undergraduate council, which is meeting tomorrow:

The Undergraduate Operations Committee met on January 29, 1998 and agreed to forward the following item to Senate Undergraduate Council for information. In order to address the increasing number of students claiming heavy employment obligations as the cause of stress leading to cheating and plagiarism, Undergraduate Operations approved the following calendar statement: "Students who by choice or necessity work more than 10 hours per week should structure their course/work load so that they can attend fully to their academic obligations (e.g., assignments, laboratories, examinations)."

Here's what's happening today

At a brown-bag lunch at Conrad Grebel College (12:15), Eleanor Grant of the Iraq Action Network will speak on "how the people and the natural environment of Iraq have suffered under the UN economic sanctions during the years since the Gulf War".

Federation of Students elections will be held tomorrow, and there's a final forum today for the candidates to air their views. It starts at 12:30 in the Math and Computer comfy lounge. Polls will be open Tuesday and Wednesday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in eight campus buildings.

The Faculty of Science Foundation presents its sixth annual Ethics Forum this evening in the Davis Centre "fishbowl". Three presentations are scheduled: "Women in Science" by Catherine Didion of the Association of Women in Science; "Naturopathic Medicine" by Paul Saunders of the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine; and "Anencephalic Infants as Organ Donors" by Amy Sepin of McGill University. Students are especially invited, as one might guess from another feature of the event: a free lasagna dinner. Talk and food start at 5 p.m.

Tomorrow -- that's Tuesday -- two career development seminars are scheduled: "Gain the Competitive Edge, Know the Employer" at 10:30 in Needles Hall room 1020, and "Workplace Safety, Know the Issues" at 1:30 in Engineering Lecture room 101. The career resource centre in Needles Hall has more information about this continuing series.

The talk of the campus

I haven't received any results from Saturday's concrete toboggan race in Calgary; will certainly make them available as soon as I get them. . . .

"If you like Reach for the Top or Jeopardy you will enjoy the UW Bowl," says Nancy O'Neil in the Student Life Centre, announcing a hot competition to be held at noontime on Tuesday, February 24. The trivia and general knowledge game will match SLC turnkeys against Federation of Students executives (who of course have a reputation for knowing everything), and O'Neil says UW president James Downey has agreed to act as scorekeeper. "We're hoping," she says, "this is going to be an annual event," and she has visions of a Waterloo team going on to compete against other universities. . . .

UW's senate usually meets once a month (on the third Monday), but not in February 1998. "It was the decision of the Senate Executive Committee on February 2 that there were insufficient agenda items to warrant a Senate meeting," says a memo from Lois Claxton, secretary of the university, so the February 16 meeting has been cancelled. . . .

Here's a paragraph of interest from the minutes of the January 22 meeting of the senate finance committee:

The loss of purchasing power in the Library acquisitions budget, due mainly to price inflation and a declining Canadian dollar, needs to be addressed urgently. . . . Even a significant increase will probably only soften the extent of the next serials cancellation project now in the planning stages. [University librarian Murray Shepherd] also noted that developments with respect to electronic journals are unlikely to provide much budgetary relief soon and, in fact, may add costs in the short term, and that savings from eliminating unnecessary duplication in the holdings of the combined UW/WLU/Guelph libraries is unlikely to exceed $200K in total. One member wondered about the wisdom of essentially giving research away to academic publishers and then buying it back at grossly inflated prices.

The finance committee will be meeting again February 24 to look at the 1998-99 budget. . . .

A grand opening for the Environmental Adaptation Research Group, to be based in UW's geography department, is scheduled for February 25. EARG is "a climate change research component of the Atmospheric Environment Service of Environment Canada", and the opening is being held along with the annual meeting of the Ontario chapter of the Soil and Water Conservation Society. . . .

A major cleanup is underway after horrendous rains fell last week on the usually sunny campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Library materials in the basements of four buildings were damaged when as much as two feet of water poured in. Hundreds of students rolled out of bed in the wee hours last Tuesday to help rescue books and sound recordings, but Green Library is estimated to have lost 120,000 books; the toll elsewhere is still being assessed. Buildings themselves have suffered serious damage, though reportedly not as much as from the 1989 earthquake. . . .

CAR