Petition seeks all exams to be held online
A petition started by Dawson College students for all final exams in its summer semester to be online has gathered nearly 500 signatures.
Summer semester classes at Dawson were online, as were spring semester classes since the school was closed to students in March because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Spring semester exams were online. But it was decided that certain exams for summer courses would take place at the school, except for biology exams, according to Dawson’s website. Those will be online. The exam period is next week.
The CEGEP’S academic dean, Diane Gauvin, said in an email Thursday that “the majority of exams are online, but for certain disciplines such as physics, chemistry and math, we have opted for in-person exams.”
Measures in place, including social distancing, masks and hand hygiene, “meet and/or exceed” government and public health guidelines, Gauvin said. She said she had revised the plan with public health authorities on Thursday afternoon, and “they are satisfied with the measures we have put in place and support our decision to hold in-person exams.”
Signatories to the petition say they don’t feel safe writing exams at the school. A survey Thursday of Montreal-area institutions of higher learning showed that virtually all have held or will hold exams online.
At Concordia University, “exams for the summer sessions were/are online,” university spokesperson Vannina Maestracci said in an email.
At Mcgill University, “in accordance with the Quebec government directive related to the coronavirus (COVID -19), the university will not hold in-person final examinations,” said media-relations officer Shirley Cardenas.
At the Université de Montréal, summer-session exams, like classes, were held online, said chief university spokesperson and media-relations adviser Geneviève O’mearaan.
At Vanier College, “most students have online exams, or final assignments/projects. In math and science, a few courses require on-campus exams,” a spokesperson said Thursday.
It is teachers who decide the format of the exams, she said.
For students with a medical condition, the Ville St-laurent CEGEP has “asked for a medical note attesting that they cannot come on campus to write the exam. In such cases, we have accommodated the student to write the exam virtually.”
One signatory to the Dawson petition is 19-year-old Miryam Guirguis, set to enter Mcgill in September to study pharmacology.
She took three summer courses at Dawson, in physics, statistics and communications, and was making up two courses she had failed. The communications course had no final exam; the final exams in the other courses count for 60 per cent of her grade.
“If the whole semester is online, then it doesn’t make any sense to bring us to the college to take the final exam,” Guirguis said on Thursday.
She said her physics teacher had told them the in-person exam is “to make sure you are not cheating.”
The class average to date is 52 per cent. Had students been cheating, “the average would be higher,” she said.
Guirguis said teachers who had shown great understanding and empathy about challenges faced by students during the last semester no longer seem to.
“We are not machines. We are humans,” she said.
Another concern is that there is barely any time between when classes end and exams are scheduled. “Whether I will start university in September solely depends on my performance on two tests I don’t have time to study for,” she said.
Guirguis said she’d chosen Dawson over two other CEGEPS to which she had been accepted because she thought of it as an inclusive place where the needs of the students are taken into account. “Now it seems to me that they don’t care.”