With 33 days left in the Student Government Association’s 51st administration, SGA is moving forward with advising initiatives the organization started last summer, as was announced at SGA’s meeting Wednesday night in the SGA Senate Chamber.
“We have made a lot a progress on (advising),” SGA President Charles Haston said. “It’s been amazing being able to work on something so comprehensive, but this is a big machine at a big university — and a big university with no centralized power, so trying to get all the deans of every single college on board with something like this, along with the Faculty Senate and (their) undergraduate committee, as well as SGA and the Provost’s office… to be able to facilitate all the changes that we laid out in that advising bill, which goes much further than just advising (is) not an easy task.”
Advising was a big-ticket issue at the beginning of the administration, when they passed a massive advising reform bill that called for lowering the student-to-adviser ratio to 250-to-1 from 293-to-1 in order to meet National Academic Advising Association recommendations.
Haston said that while their biggest goal of having online surveys sent out to students after advising session has been successfully implemented, SGA doesn’t want to let some of the other issues “fall by the wayside.”
Changes that have not been made include updating course catalogs, as well as adding course descriptions onto myUH so that students will be able to see them while picking their classes. Currently, course catalogs are available through the UH website.
“(SGA wants) to facilitate some type of structure that actually enables the University to make changes quickly to the course catalog when those course are updated,” Haston said.
The next SGA meeting will take place Wed., March 4 at 7:30 p.m. in the SGA Senate Chambers.
