澳门六合彩开奖预测

Senate Agenda, May 21, 1999 - EXHIBIT VIII

Report on the 245th Meeting of the Council of Ontario Universities

D.M.R. Bentley, Academic Colleague

At the meetings of the Academic Colleagues and the Council of Ontario Universities in Toronto on April 9, several matters of interest and importance to Senate were decided and discussed:

• Council endorsed in principle "The Ontario College-University Completion Accord" of March 26, 1999 (copy of the accord is available on paper from the University Secretariat) and an itinerary for its implementation by September 2000.
• Council approved in principle a letter from the President of COU, Dr. Ian Clark, to the Ontario Integrity Commissioner, The Honorable Robert C. Rutherford, explaining why the Council will not register under the Lobbyists' Registration Act (the "activities of COU employees defined as lobbying under the Act fall well below the 20% threshold" that would require registration).
• Council received and discussed a "Background Paper on Grade Twelve Exit Examinations," the primary recommendation of which is that, "[s]ince COU wishes to pursue further the issue of developing a policy concerning the place of final examinations in evaluating the achievement of high school students, it should request the [Council's] Task Force on Secondary School Issues to make recommendations concerning the mandate, scope, management, and membership of a committee established to study and report on the issue." Informing the discussion was an awareness of continuing grade inflation in Ontario secondary schools (the system average in 1997 was 80.1%, up from 79.8% in 1996, and the percentage of registered applicants who received 80% or higher in secondary school was 54.9% in 1997, up from 53.6% in 1996). Council was also made aware of recent data from The University of 澳门六合彩开奖预测 Ontario that indicates wide disparities among the marking practices of Ontario secondary schools in terms of the differences between the marks of their graduates in OAC and first-year courses.⁽¹⁾
• Council was informed by the President of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, Robert Giroux, that, under pressure from private career colleges, the needs-based scholarships of the Canadian Millennium Scholarships Foundation will not be distributed until the second year of post-secondary education. This is a matter of concern because it compromises a major purpose of the scholarships - namely, to make post-secondary education more accessible.
• Council also learned from the President of AUCC that a preliminary paper on intellectual property by a committee chaired by Pierre Fortier expresses the view that the results of projects funded by federal granting agencies should belong to the university or universities in which a project is housed.
• Council was informed that the release on March 31 of the materials arising from the "Meeting Expectations Project" - "Ontario Students, Ontario's Future", "Will there be room for me?" and the "Meeting Expectations Project" itself - received wide and, from COU's perspective, very enthusiastic coverage in the media, the exceptions that proved the rule being the silence of the Kingston Whig-Standard and a report in the London Free Press under the headline "Universities lobby for gobs of money."

1. At the Academic Colleagues' meeting, some consternation was occasioned by the information that the COU Task Force on Secondary School Issues might recommend that after the abolition of OACs there be no minimum number of courses (for example, 4 university courses) for entry to Ontario universities. (At present the minimum is 6 OACs.) A further cause for concern was the information that, in the absence of clear guidelines from the Ministry of Education and the universities themselves about future entrance requirements, some school boards are giving students advice that is possibly erroneous and potentially damaging. The Waterloo School Board, for example, is informing students who will be entering Grade 9 next year that they need not take an English course if they are planning to go into Engineering.

On a different but not entirely unrelated matter, several colleagues expressed misgivings at the amount of money, time, and energy now being expended on recruitment, particularly, relative to their budgets, by smaller universities.