Can I copy your answers?: Education Officer Stephen Crosby reflects on summer preparation
By Ekatherina Gillen | Oct 4 2018
The Education Officer is in charge of “issues of academic interest” including fees, exams and library services. The Education Officer also handles confidential cases of individual students who are struggling with the aforementioned areas whilst in UCD.In his election campaign, Stephen Crosby expressed his aim to work on gradually abolishing resit and repeat fees.“Over the course of the summer months, following on from an immensely helpful and insightful crossover period, my work has been focused primarily in two areas.” His intention was to begin by getting UCD to agree to cap resit fees and campaign for further reductions after that. The Education Officer has also previously expressed his dissatisfaction with the way UCD treats students that are falling behind in their academics due to external stress, noting the “six-week waiting time for the counselling service.” He also planned to advocate against grade capping on repeats, meaning a previous failure would not impact the result of your repeat. Crosby provided the University Observer with his experience of working with Union so far: “One of my main projects in this area was the writing and distribution of two academic guides aimed at first year and final year students respectively. These guides will be distributed during both Freshers Week and early in semester two.”Outlining his long term plans for the duration of his tenure, Crosby said that “the second area of work which I have undertaken during the summer months is my representation of the student voice on numerous boards and committees within UCD. Two of these boards which have already seen successes for students are the groups overseeing both UCD’s new Virtual Learning Environment (Brightspace) and the evaluation of the Grade Scales used in UCD respectively. Membership of and participation in these groups has allowed UCDSU to harness the student voice to influence two key areas of academic life in UCD.”