Efforts to educate students about the unit progress requirement
continue in full force.
In collaboration with the Undergraduate Students Association
Council and its staff, student leaders have launched a publicity
campaign to educate students about the expected cumulative progress
requirement and to encourage them to participate in a survey
regarding its effects.
The survey became available last Monday and will go on for two
weeks.
ECP requires UCLA College undergraduates to take a minimum of 13
units per quarter in order to meet cumulative unit progress
requirements.
“I think that the buzz is really starting to infiltrate
campus. It’s definitely spreading,” said Jenny Wood, a
USAC general representative.
The Institutional Review Board, the agent that approved the
content and language of the survey along with educational
literature about the policy, requires that all publicity efforts
regarding the survey be neutral.
USAC has meanwhile set the repeal of ECP as one of its action
agenda items.
Since the policy’s inception in 2001, USAC has taken a
well-publicized, negative stance on the requirement. However, USAC
is not permitted to make its opinions a part of the campaign that
encourages students to fill out the ECP survey.
USAC council members are pleased so far with their own efforts
in the campaign, as well as the responses from students.
“I think students have been very positive about the
opportunity to fill out a survey on an academic policy that is
affecting them, possibly negatively,” said Tommy Tseng,
general representative of USAC.
A recent point of dissension among council members has been how
to ensure equal distribution of the funding and manpower for the
campaign among different USAC offices.
“A source of frustration is that while almost every office
is contributing to the campaign to some extent, the general
representatives’ office is basically taking up a big portion
of the work that we’ve done on ECP,” Tseng said.
“I am pleased with the progress that council has made as a
collective, although we can certainly do a lot more.”
Publicity efforts include mass e-mails to all registered
students of UClA College, flyers, posters and presentations in
classes and to student organizations. Wood and USAC President
Allende Palma/Saracho also visited Greek organizations this past
Monday.
Some of those who listened to Wood and Palma/Saracho’s
presentations said they did not feel they presented the survey in a
neutral way.
In their visit to Delta Gamma sorority, “they were saying
that they wanted us to take a survey to see if we wanted to do away
with the ECP. They were just trying to present the argument for why
they were getting rid of it,” said Krista Haertle,
second-year political science student and a Delta Gamma member.
“I was under the impression that they were actively trying
to be against ECP, actually trying to do away with it. I had no
idea they were supposed to be neutral,” Haertle said.
Another publicity attempt is “Facebook spam.” The
Facebook, a popular internet social network for college students,
allows members to send bulk messages to all their friends at
UCLA.
The USAC-authored template currently circulating asks students:
“Did you know that you can get kicked out of this university
for failing to adhere to this requirement?”
In addition to Internet links to the survey, students can
participate via several on-campus locations.
Mobile survey stations with laptops equipped with wireless
Internet are available at Ackerman, Northern Lights and LuValle
Commons.
Wood maintains that the survey stations are “a very
neutral way to inform people what it’s all about.”
Mobile stations provide opportunities to all students to
complete the survey, and they are staffed by student workers that
distribute educational materials and answer questions.
The mobile stations, originally facing Internet problems and
understaffing, are now fully operational.
“It takes a lot of people to be out there in full
force,” Wood said. “But we’re doing the best we
can.”
It was reported at Tuesday’s USAC meeting that 1,300
students filled out the survey in the first two days of its
availability.
This number may include multiple submissions by the same
student. The survey does not record any identification information
to keep student comments and opinions anonymous, and it does not
prevent students from completing the survey multiple times or stop
individuals who are not UCLA students from participating.
Lisa Raigosa, the student support services manager for
Associated Students of UCLA, declined to release an updated raw
number of completed surveys.
“I don’t think we can release that because we
haven’t verified that the surveys have been completed,”
Raigosa said, referring to the fact that incomplete surveys still
have to be eliminated.
USAC and ASUCLA officials would release the completed surveys
filled out by an estimated 12 percent of the student body.
But the percentage of students who completed the survey includes
surveys that were only partially completed. A 12 percent estimate
of survey completion would bring the total number of participants
to about 2,500.
Survey results may be inaccurate due to the voluntary nature of
participation, though the Institutional Review Board required that
the survey be administered in this fashion. For survey results to
be truly representative of a population, the survey should be
administered to a random sample of students.
The results of the survey are what USAC plans to use as the
basis of their argument for repealing the ECP requirement. The ECP
Task Force, a coalition comprised of USAC members and other
concerned student groups, considers the campaign to be on track
with their goals.
“The ECP Task Force itself, as an organization, never has
formally established a target, but from the conversations
I’ve had with some coordinators and student committees,
we’re thinking that 5,000 students might be a good number to
reach,” Tseng said.
The survey and publicity efforts will continue through next
week, and USAC officials expect survey completion “to
increase dramatically,” Wood said.