The Queen’s rumour mill is churning, and our readers continue to keep QCAA up to speed. Thank you! If you don’t see your gossip here today, we’re saving it for another post. Stay tuned!

On Exam Chaos and Absurd Austerity Measures

What does austerity at Queen’s look like on the ground, where students and staff just try to get through the day? I would direct you to look at the exams office and their overall staffing crisis. Queen’s has implemented a hiring freeze and is filling needed positions with term appointments. This typically means that a person will work in a role for 6 months to a year and then be “let go” just as they are getting to know the ins and outs of their job. They do these jobs with no benefits and pension entitlements. Sometimes these term appointments are set for just a few days shy of three years because if you are employed in a position for three years plus a day, your position is automatically converted to a continuing position with benefits and a pension. A continuing position means that upper management acknowledges the work will continually need to be completed year after year and is not just a one-off contract. Obviously, in the minds of upper management, it is cheaper to let people go and train a new person all over again or try to do without by making someone else do extra work. As any good business would know, this is not true. Constant retraining, precarious employment, worker burnout, worker sick leave, and low morale are expensive in the long run.

Imagine what this does to a workplace like the exams office, on which every student and professor depends to complete a basic primary function of the university. The result is chaos. How exams are scheduled and in what venues, and how exams are printed, distributed, and collected, depends on institutional memory and the expertise of people who understand why and how things can go wrong and why procedures and protocols exist. These are the people who can save a business money because they understand how to operate efficiently.

Are you a student who has stood out in the snow and rain because there is not enough room in a building for all the people who showed up for your exam? Have you started your exam late because there were not enough copies to go around in the venue? Have you been told to run to another building on campus because there are no seats left for your exam in the venue you were told to show up to? Has your SOLUS account told you an exam is in one place when it is in another? Are you a professor whose administrative assistant was one of the people laid off by senior leadership’s restructuring plan? I met one such prof this December whose Crowdmark exam was not formatted correctly, and he said, “the person who did this for me was laid off and this is not a skill set that I have”. The exam had to be altered such that some questions were not counted, and the students were stressed and confused during the exam. These scenarios are sadly becoming the norm not the exception.

Let’s not overlook the people who actually run the exams, the mostly Kingston retirees who work as proctors for the exams office, making sure that academic integrity is maintained and the venues run smoothly. They handle the tears, panic attacks, and sick students. They stand in washrooms watching for cheating, and they spend hours on their feet and ensure that every exam that comes in gets back to the professors. It seems there was a rumour going around that if one asked for the legally required overtime after doing a 44-hour week, one would not be invited back to proctor. This rumour was quelled by the announcement that overtime would be paid, it was likely the threat of calling the Ontario Labour Board that ensured that at least the workplace was legal. These same folks were then told that, due to a “budget crisis,” they would no longer get a parking permit. A permit that is only good for the two-week exam period. But a parking ticket is the loss of an hour’s pay, so upper management acquiesced and gave passes to some folks for the St. Mary’s parking lot, so they could arrive at 7:00 instead of 7:30 am and hobble their way on bum knees and hips through the ice and snow to main campus to work for an apparently ungrateful institution. Yeah, that’s right, Queen’s asked workers in their seventies and eighties to walk from St. Mary’s to campus for 20 bucks an hour. Often these proctors do this to arrive at their venue to find out they don’t have enough exams, or clocks that work, or they discover students were told to show up where there was no exam. Nevertheless, they make it work by luck and perseverance and then walk back to St Mary’s at 10:00 pm in the dark.

Is it worth it? Probably not.

Queen’s is on the verge of losing the last of the people that have any idea how to make this vital function functional. Say goodbye to the people who actually know how to run an exam. The humiliation and stress is no longer worth it. This is just one way the manufactured budget crisis impacts students directly.

On Program Suspensions

I just came across this LinkedIn post (link) by Vice-Provost, Teaching and Learning, Gavan Watson in which he talks up program suspensions and negates the link between program suspensions and closures, despite evidence that the former usually leads to the latter. Is this appropriate behaviour for a member of the Queen’s senior administration? Is his claim an indication of the extent to which Nous is in command around here?

Leave a comment