President Sheldon Levy announced at the Ryerson Senate meeting on Oct. 4 that a make up test centre for students is set to open in January 2012.
Make up tests have previously been written through the Access Centre or through the individual faculties themselves.
“I would imagine some of the individual faculty members found it difficult to be able to accommodate the students on an individual level and thought it better to have the option to do it centrally,” said Levy.
The Access Centre, responsible for providing disability accommodation services as well as support for academic success, also took on the responsibility of invigilating non-Access Centre tests in the basement of the Victoria building.
The new location will provide a distinction between the services, open up more booking time and reduce the work for the employees of the Access Centre.
“It will make it clearer to students and faculty that they’re not an Access Centre student,” said Heather Lane Veter, vice provost
students.
Veter and Chris Evans, vice provost academic, wrote a report to the Senate detailing why the relocation of the centre was a necessary move.
“The main reason we wrote this report was concern expressed to us by faculty who couldn’t get the Access Centre to invigilate exams during a busy time of year because they were busy with Access Centre students,” said Veter.
There are blackout periods in which the centre is too busy with the Access students to run exams, during midterms (Oct. 7 – 28) and during finals (Nov. 28 – Dec. 17).
Non-access students are also restricted to writing only on Wednesday from 3 to 7 p.m. and Friday from 12 to 4 p.m.
The report also detailed a twenty per cent increase in tests written by non-Access students from the 2009-10 to the 2010-11 academic year.
No budget has been set, but they are looking to hire a coordinating position that would work at both centres.
Neither coordinating positions would be a full-time job, so the hiree will go back and forth as needed.
The new test centre will likely be moved to a classroom-sized space, seating up to thirty students writing at one time.
The location has not yet been confirmed, though a room in the Victoria building has been considered a possibilty for the new test centre.
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