Quality

To achieve high quality of education the following working groups have been assigned:

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1. Exams, courses, midterms

Team: Marko Virkebau (chairing), Joren Verkade, Marije Duijn.

a) Exams:

Faculty regulations have strict rules regarding exams and trial exams. Such problems may occur as professor not providing the trial exam for students or requesting students to submit the actual exam paper together with the solutions. Such and similar actions go against the Faculty regulation and have to be monitored by the Student Council.

b) Courses:

Student Council sometimes receives complaints about teaching qualities of certain lectures. Oftentimes it is related to Assistant Professors (PhD students), but other reasons occur as well.

Through receiving, assessing and acting upon complaints and comments received from students, Council will monitor and work on improving the situation with lecture quality on a per-case basis.

Besides that, council expects much work with the Operations Research MSc Programme due to negotiations with the University regarding cancelling the entire track. Council will always take into account best interest of students and will review all available solutions.

c) Midterms:

To increase the quality of education students have to be involved with their study constantly. Therefore the Faculty and the Student Council believe that assigning midterm exams (during the study block) or having other forms of constant assessment (assignments, essays, presentations etc.) are valuable means to improve education. It has therefore been agreed that at least 30% of the entire grade for the course will consist of work other than the exam.

However, sometimes professors are reluctant to provide these forms of examination, or their assignments / midterms lack quality. Student Council will actively monitor student assessment ensuring that it adheres to desired quality and is within Faculty regulations.

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2. Taping lectures

Team: Joren Verkade (chairing), Egor Gorshkov, Anahita Farokhi

As of 2011-2012 academic year the second resit has been abandoned by the Faculty. Instead, Student Council of year 2010-2012 made an agreement with the Faculty that all Bachelor lectures will be either taped, slidecasted (voice-over lecture slides) or there will be an additional recap lecture at the end of the period.

The project is currently in the pilot and the Faculty is assessing its success at the end of the first semester. At the moment all first-year Bachelor lectures are supposed to be taped (it there is a reasonable attendance) or slidecasted.

Student Council aims to actively seek out possibilities of digitizing lectures and increase the amount of lectures taped / slidecasted. To achieve that, Council has to seek out timely feedback from professors, students and the ICT department. Also, Student Council will actively promote the two possibilities to professors yet unaware of these developments.