McMaster introduced updates to the MSAF policy for the 2023/2024 school year, including clarification on the types of requests for relief and timelines associated with requests
The McMaster Student Absence Form allows McMaster University students to request relief from coursework due to medical or personal reasons.
McMaster recently updated their MSAF policy to clarify some terms and add more definitive timelines to the process. This new policy came into effect on Sept. 1.
“[MSAF]'s recognizing that absence has happened. It's also honoring that when an absence happens, that it creates a lot of anxiety for students. So we want to make sure that there is appropriate relief provided so that they're able to keep up with their work, not fall behind not face any academic repercussions, you know, great loss or falling behind in the work” said Kim Dej, vice provost (teaching and learning).
These updates include the renaming the forms for each type MSAF available to students.
Previously titled Type A and B forms, under they new policy they are now referred to as self report and administrative report, respectively. Dej explained that the previous titles were vague and hoped the renaming would make it easier for students to understand where to find them and when to use them. The self report form can be completed through Mosaic, while the administrative report must be filed by an academic advisor.
Dej also explained many of the newly implemented changes were in order to provide greater clarity for students and instructors.
Under the previous policy, there was no time frame by which students were required to have informed their professors about their request for relief. This ambiguity often caused miscommunication between students and instructors and hindered the instructor's ability to offer proper support, in turn harming the student's ability to catch up.
“The things that we've done to change the policy are really trying to tighten all of those timelines to make sure that students can catch up properly and that institute instructors are able to provide prompt support and relief as well,” said Dej.
Previously, what is now known as the self report MSAF indicated that when you utilize it, you can request relief for any work that falls into the three days of absences that is under 25 per cent. This remains the same in the new policy, but the new policy also requires that within 24 hours following the third day of relief, you must contact all instructors whose coursework was impacted by the absence.
This remains the same in the new policy, but the new policy also requires that within 24 hours following the third day of relief, you must contact all instructors whose coursework was impacted by the absence.
The administrative report MSAF is primarily utilized when a student finds that their absence exceeded three days or if the cumulative coursework they’re seeking relief for will exceed 25per cent per course.
The new policy indicates that if the coursework exceeds 35 per cent, students must speak to an academic advisor in their department. Dej explained that this requirement is so that students receive proper support and that they are able to catch up when missing such a large portion of their coursework.
“If you've deferred different pieces throughout the course and now the cumulative value of those is more than 35 per cent we ask that students go through the administrative report, not because they've done anything wrong, [but because] we just want to make sure that they're okay. That's a lot to miss in a course [and] we want to make sure that they're able to keep up and catch up,” said Dej.
We ask that students go through the administrative report, not because they've done anything wrong, [but because] we just want to make sure that they're okay. That's a lot to miss in a course [and] we want to make sure that they're able to keep up and catch up.
Kim Dej, vice provost (teaching and learning)
The conversations about these updates to the MSAF policy have been in the works since Fall 2022 and involved many levels of governance at McMaster, including the Undergraduate Council and the McMaster Students Union.
Dej emphasized that there is always room for improvement for these policies and as the year progresses Dej’s team will be investigating the use of MSAF between previous years and this current year, to find what is or isn’t working.
Dej also encouraged students to send her emails to vptl@mcmaster.ca to voice their opinions about the MSAF.
“I'm always here to listen, I would love to find more forums for students to have a voice in these kinds of policy discussions. We have spectacular undergraduate student representation on [the] Undergraduate Council, but in the end, it's seven voices representing over 30,000 students,” said Dej.
The new MSAF policies have been implemented to encourage students to request relief and to aid instructors to better support students when they do need help. Ways to improve the policy will continue to be explored and shaped by student experience.
For students worrying about one 50 per cent weighted exam determining whether they pass or fail, there may be help coming in the future. The McMaster Students Union university affairs committee has begun their advocacy efforts to push to eliminate “high-risk” exams worth 50 per cent or more of a student’s grade.
This goal was outlined in the 2017-2018 MSU academic success policy paper but has been actively taken up this year by the University Affairs committee, headed by associate vice president (University Affairs) Tasneem Warwani. It is part of a broader initiative to review “academic services.”
As it stands, there is no official McMaster policy capping the weight of an exam. The committee is concerned that heavily-weighted assessments can be increasingly stressful for students and do not set students up for success.
“You can do phenomenally throughout the semester and then you can have something happen,” Warwani said. “If you do so well throughout the semester and then you are writing a 70 per cent exam and you just crash and burn during the exam, it does not make sense that you should fail entirely based on that.”
The Student Representative Assembly engineering caucus is also working to eliminate high-risk exams for engineering students. However, the university affairs committee is aiming for a university-wide policy.
High-risk exams sometimes occur when students use their McMaster Student Absence Form for an assignment or midterm, and the re-weighting makes the final exam “high-risk.” Under the accommodation section, the McMaster Undergraduate Course Management Policies recommends that an instructor should seek approval before re-weighting one assessment to 75 per cent or more.
The University Affairs committee ultimately wants to see a hard cap at 50 per cent, even in MSAF cases. Warwani suggested other alternatives to shifting weight to a final exam, such as rewriting an evaluation, should be more standardized.
Warwani acknowledges that professors often have legitimate reasons for being reluctant to reschedule missed tests.
“There are lots of things that might be a little bit more difficult to do but if it means that our students are succeeding from it, then I think that we should be moving towards those,” Warwani said. “I am hopeful that we can find some sort of middle ground.”
Warwani said that one situation where a high-risk exam could be acceptable is in a structure with different weighing options where the professor weighs exams more heavily only if it results in a higher grade for a student.
The university affairs committee also aims to work towards having more specific standardized MSAF policies on course outlines. Warwani believes that if the outlines are clearer on how and when accommodations will be provided in the case of MSAFs, students and professors will be better off, and students will not be uncertain about whether an MSAF now will mean writing a high-risk exam later.
Currently, the committee is still researching the issue to determine which faculties are most affected and to what extent. They plan to release an online “info pack” document on the issue for students in the next couple of months. From there, they will begin formally consulting with university administration and faculty coordinators to move from advocacy to potential policy.
For any sort of policy to be considered, the issue must be discussed first in the university senate. The process of advocating for the elimination of high-risk exams is a big project for the committee and has only just begun.
[spacer height="20px"][thesil_related_posts_sc]Related Posts[/thesil_related_posts_sc]
By: Grace Huang
As midterm season continues, discussions about the McMaster Student Absence Form can be heard everywhere on campus. Since 2010, students have been using the MSAF to get out of tests and assignments. Depending on the course, the assignment or midterm would be pushed back to a later date or the equivalent weighting would get carried over to the final exam. Both of these ways generate temporary relief, but how much is the MSAF really benefitting students?
Being evaluated on knowledge and applications at the intended date is as beneficial to the student as being evaluated on the same thing a few days later. The only difference would be that they would have had a few more days to gather their thoughts and have more confidence before submitting their work or writing their test.
The MSAF becomes questionable when the weights of these assessments get pushed into the final exam. This can make exams worth well over 60 per cent of their final course grade and puts unnecessary stress on students at the final push of exams. The MSAF should only be used to extend deadlines and push back test days rather than be used to skip midterms.
The MSAF is special to McMaster. Most universities in Canada only excuse students from missing schoolwork if they provide a valid reason with proof. Prior to 2010, McMaster had the same policy, but students began forging doctor’s notes to get out of evaluations. In response to this problem, the school created the MSAF so students could excuse themselves once a term. This was a great idea to begin with, but students have gradually taken advantage of this with the “strategic MSAF.”
The strategic MSAF has been used as a saving grace to get out of perceptually challenging midterms, but this is not conveying the right message. Being able to opt out of something unfavourable is simply not something that happens in the real world. While it may feel relieving in the moment, it adds extra unnecessary pressure to the final exam.
Many professors have informed their classes that students who use their MSAF on the midterm do not do as well on the final exam as the rest of the students. Reasons for this include the stress factor stated previously as well as the fact that missing a midterm means missing a checkpoint that prepares students for the final.
In other words, if students do not prepare for a midterm because they plan to use MSAF, they would have to work twice as hard in preparation for the final. Again, pushing a midterm back a few days in a period of bunched up midterms is certainly beneficial for students, but temporarily getting rid of it and reweighing the mark distribution to the final exam is simply unwise and ludicrous.
In addition to the stress and forecasted low performance, using the MSAF to reweight marks to the final can also harm the content stored in a student’s long-term memory. Students often lose focus of how the point of studying is to be evaluated on their knowledge. Students who do not have these evaluations will have gaps in their understanding of content, especially if the final is cumulative, because of the lack of reinforcement studying. The consequences could carry over to the next year, as lots of material can be prerequisite to the next year’s courses. With negative outcomes outweighing the positive, it is undeniable that the MSAF should not be available to reweight midterms.
The use of the MSAF is beneficial when assignments and midterms are cluttered and the student just needs a few more days for one evaluation. The McMaster administrative team and course coordinators should seriously consider eliminating the trap of shifting the weight of a midterm to the final because it causes unnecessary stress and reduces overall learning for the student.
For the past 25 years, Maclean’s magazine has released a comprehensive ranking of Canadian Universities.
The ranking takes into account numerous categories including, but not limited to: program details, finances, scholarship opportunities, reputational rankings, and historically, survey results conducted by the universities themselves.
This year, for the first time in the magazine’s history, instead of relying on the independent surveys distributed by each academic institution, they conducted their own Student Satisfaction Survey to receive unique data on the lived student experience.
The survey asked questions related to familiarity and closeness with professors, feeling prepared to enter the workforce, critical thinking education, mental health services on campus and more.
If you’ve been keeping up with these rankings, you will know that this year McMaster received an overall fifth place ranking among Canadian institutions, and according to the Student Satisfaction Survey, it is the top ranked university for the provision of mental health services. McMaster Daily News was quick to tote the university’s place at the top of the Mental Health pyramid, but many students can attest to the fact that the school, like many others, still has a long way to go before being considered a front-runner in the Canadian mental health awareness journey.
In one breath, there are elements of McMaster’s mental health provisions that are fantastic and an undeniable privilege compared to the facilities available to our academic neighbours. We have on-campus services that provide counselling and therapy, the McMaster Student Absence Form that allows students to take time off in moments of ailment, and a few student-run services that work to give students one-on-one time. But just how many students are actually able to access these programs?
As someone who has used these services, I know that there is often a waitlist for services, and barriers with professors and programs can arise when filing documentation or completing an MSAF [FEB. 12, 2015 – “Let’s talk about the MSAF”].
The Satisfaction Survey received responses from over 10,000 students across the country, with 310 of those being from McMaster. A mere 1.02 percent of McMaster’s 30,000+ student population was surveyed to reach this ranking, and the magazine acknowledges that it was not the most in-depth analysis for this particular category.
This is an extremely small population of people to begin with, but on top of this, of this one percent, how many of these students have actually experienced mental health concerns to the point that they’ve required McMaster’s services?
The only question on the survey related to mental health was “How would you rate the following at your school,” with “Mental Health Services” being one of the rated categories. The survey was not detailed in this category, and as excited as the university is, and many of its students are, to receive this ranking and celebrate McMaster’s efforts to improve mental health treatment on campus, we cannot convince ourselves that it is an appropriate representation of the services we provide for students.
Thousands of incoming university students see these rankings and make their choices based on the information provided. While this rank is a boost for the University, we still have an obligation to continue working to make sure our mental health services are the best they can be, and keep incoming students informed about the realistic limitations of our services, as well as our efforts to improve them.
Just because our university has received this one unsubstantiated ranking, it does not mean we have peaked at our ability to adequately serve the needs of all our students.
