Feedback on proposed changes to core curriculum Jack Nagy, Bond graduate January 2013

Foreword The following document contains my feedback on the proposed changes to the core curriculum. For reference, I'm a former Bond student who took Reasoning Skills, Public Speaking, Cultural and Ethical Values, and Entrepreneurship as my core subjects. Unfortunately, my sentiment here is mostly negative, and I feel that most students or graduates that have heard about the proposed changes share this sentiment, albeit for different reasons. The current core system is flawed and could be greatly improved. I particularly recall students questioning the utility of the cores offered to them. However, I feel that these proposed changes will only aggravate the problems, rather than provide a solution. I am especially uncertain as to why the proposed changes axe both Public Speaking and Reasoning Skills; as far as Im aware, the lecturers involved are among the most popular and well-loved at Bond, making their place in a core curriculum (which new students tend to experience first and form their opinion of Bond accordingly) vital. Their replacement subject cannot and will not do them justice. I am saddened that my old university appears to be seriously considering removing two of the most useful subjects at Bond, specifically Reasoning Skills, which rather encapsulates to me what a university should place emphasis on. I am also uncertain as to why Bond appears to be removing its focus on entrepreneurship and replacing it with a career emphasis. While I currently attend the University of Queensland, one of the traits I remember most fondly about Bond was its entrepreneurial spirit. These proposals only hinder that and remove it as a source of differentiation from other universities. I also question whether removing the Pick between two cores system as well as combining multiple cores into one will further increase lecture (and even tutorial) sizes and anonymity, working against Bonds reputation and advertising of small class sizes and openness. I will try to provide some constructive feedback and possible proposals through this document. For the most part, though, the sentiment of this document is that if the choice is between the current core system and the suggested changes, I would overwhelmingly prefer the current system. I was reasonably well known and social at Bond, and remain in contact with fellow graduates and current students there. As a result, I have given my best guess as to likely student reactions to the core changes at the bottom of each section. They are largely in line with what I believe and have listed here; I am conscious of the similarity, but believe I am objectively representing likely student reactions fairly well despite any human bias to wish others feel the same as me. Judging by other student feedback to these changes, they actually do feel the same. I was not involved in the panels on this topic, and my information about the subjects below has come mostly second hand. That said, I do trust in its accuracy. I also want to note that I am aware of other feedback that has been given on these proposed changes. While I will not repeat it here, I do want to note that I largely support the other critiques I have heard or read, and wish to echo their comments.

My best wishes to Bond and its students, Jack Nagy Jn.041193@gmail.com

1. Information, Ideas and Communication Judging by the major themes suggested, this class seems like an obvious attempt to combine three classes (Public Speaking, Communication Skills, and Reasoning Skills) into one, or at the very least meet all the major themes that these three subjects previously covered. While I felt (and heard) that there certainly could've been more content, utility, and depth in these classes, combining all three into one is an excessive solution that will do more harm than good. I am also assuming here that roughly an equal amount of time, effort, and assessment would be dedicated to the content of each of these (former) subjects. Lecturing Capability The first concern of mine is that Bond does not currently have a lecturer capable of fulfilling this triple function in a manner where each individual role or subject is covered to as high a standard as currently exists. A lecturing candidate would need to be found that could teach public speaking as well as Mike Grenby, reasoning skills as well as Russell McPhee, and communication skills as well as the current lecturer in that field. I do not have access to TEVALS, but unless student opinion has changed dramatically in the six months since I have graduated from Bond, both Mike and Russell ought to be very highly rated as teachers. I therefore believe that finding a lecturer that not only beats both of them at their own game, but can teach the content three times faster with the same student retention (to accommodate the triple function this subject seems to serve), will be impossible. The only solution I can see to that particular issue (while retaining this hybrid subject) would be to retain the lecturers who currently teach these subjects and have them lecture on the subject as a trio, perhaps four weeks at a time. I am quite sure, however, that this would irritate them to no end and leave the university with the question of what to do with these lecturers for the weeks that their content is not being taught in this subject. Id also note that the quality of Mike and Russell as lecturers (again, I did not take Communication Skills) is particularly important as their courses tend to be taken at the very beginning of a students degree, which is mandated by their core status. They help form a distinct and favourable first (and lasting) impression of the capability of Bonds teachers, which makes their subjects and status as lecturers particularly worthy of protection. These cores serve a function for setting Bond apart from other universities; for instance, I am currently studying at the University of Queensland, and while I rate it highly as a university, my first impression of it, its courses and its faculties was one of unfriendliness and anonymity. Creating a hybrid subject with different lecturers (or, potentially, making existing lecturers share the subject) greatly harms Bonds competitive advantage in this aspect. Tutoring Capability This problem also carries over to tutoring capabilities. By merging the three cores into one, and forcing tutors to cover such a wide range of topics, these changes would harm tutoring in two ways. First, they would unnecessarily limit the extent to which each tutor's individual strengths can be used properly. For instance, a public speaking tutor may have a terrific ability to bring shy students out of their shell, but this would be limited by a scarcity of time to devote to doing so. When I took Public Speaking, I saw colleagues only really begin to loosen up and gain some confidence in the last weeks of the semester. With less time to devote to public speaking, I doubt that this class would have the same impact. It potentially may have no impact at all, as a threshold may need to be reached before any lasting effect can occur after just four weeks of public speaking, I would not be surprised if students simply reverted to their previous state and insecurities, making that entire section of the course worthless.

I highlight public speaking here because it is a terrific example of a skill that genuinely requires time to develop (not just content or memorisation), but I think the same harm occurs when teaching communications or reasoning. By devoting less time to each, tutors who excel at teaching in those fields would have their talent wasted. My tutors for both Public Speaking and Reasoning Skills were, in my opinion, very effective tutors, and I do not wish their talents in this area to be misused. The second harm that would occur if these subjects were shunted together is that tutors would be forced to assume a variety of roles, not all of which will be equally natural to them. Just because a tutor has the capability or willingness to assume further roles does not mean that they will fulfil them as competently as another tutor who was, prior to the changes, designated specifically to that subject. This mimics the problem I mentioned above of choosing an appropriate lecturer. It is mitigated somewhat by the fact that having a tutor that is competent in every topic of the course is not as important as having a lecturer that is competent in every topic of the course. However, it is exacerbated by the fact that this subject will require vastly more tutors than lecturers, and therefore face this problem many times over. Quite simply, I do not believe that Bond has access to lecturers and tutors that could teach this generalised subject to as high a standard as Bond currently teaches several specialised subjects. I would personally much rather three high quality, compulsory subjects than one mediocre, compulsory subject. Content I have no doubt that in order to combine these three subjects, some content would be cut. These subjects are a little content sparse at times, but not to the extent where Bond could teach 36 weeks of previous content in just 12 weeks in the new system. Therefore, it is safe to conclude that some content will be cut from the previous Public Speaking, Communication Skills, and Reasoning Skills curriculums. This is, needless to say, problematic. I have already highlighted the main issue with cutting public speaking content above; that is, confidence building (which is one of the key aims of the course) takes time, which cannot be granted in this subject. I did not take Communication Skills, so I cannot speak for that subject. In terms of maintaining Reasoning Skills content, it seems to me that the curriculum when I took it could have been loosely divided into two areas formal and informal fallacies. Formal fallacies include discussion of arguments such as If X then Y, Y, but not necessarily X. Informal fallacies include discussion of more tangible and everyday fallacies, such as a dependence on ad hominem arguments or appeals to nature. It seems to me that there is little point or utility in teaching only segments of each of these areas. The first few weeks of the formal fallacies segment involved getting used to the terminology and structure of syllogistic logic by running through fairly basic arguments. This isnt particularly difficult work, but skipping it would make the latter half of the formal fallacies segment impossible to teach. The informal fallacies segment relies heavily on the first half of the course. I believe it could be taught separately, but it would have to consist mostly of X is wrong without granting students a real understanding of exactly why it is wrong, and it is my opinion that a university should be in the business of teaching students how to think, rather than what to think. For this reason, I do not believe Reasoning Skills can have any significant amount of its content cut without becoming a poor subject. Unless Bond wishes to attempt teaching all 12 weeks of Reasoning Skills content in a third of the time in this new subject (for which the subject would definitely need Russell as the lecturer), I do not see how this subject can be merged satisfactorily. An ability to use logic and spot fallacies cannot be adequately tacked on as an afterthought to another course, or slotted in among public speaking and communication skills advice.

I find it particularly unusual that Reasoning Skills is facing the chopping block under this proposal. I was under the impression coming to the university that I would be taught not just what to think, but how to think. This is, above all else, the trait that should separate a university graduate from the layperson or hobbyist. Skills and knowledge can be taught relatively easily, while it is the prime function of a university to foster and place primacy on intelligence and critical thinking. Yet, under this proposal, the one subject at Bond University explicitly devoted to these topics would be gone, merged in a half-hearted fashion into a hybrid with two other subjects. The proposed changes are especially confusing in their priorities given that skills like leadership and teamwork (which are taught in plenty of existing subjects and encouraged through group assessment) would now be given an entire twelve week subject, while argument and fallacy analysis (which appear nowhere else in the entire Bond curriculum, as far as I can tell) would likely merit a third of that time under the new, hybrid course. An institution that should be devoted to thinking ought to at least have a subject on the matter. Assessment In addition to the drastic content cut that would need to occur in order to hit all of the desired themes, there would also be a change in assessment. I assume Bond does not wish to give this subject triple the workload of an ordinary subject. There would thus be need for overlap in this subjects assessment, where an individual assessment covers skills from two or three of the prior cores being merged. I think that some overlap is possible (for example, by requiring speech outlines to be communicated well, or by requiring a well-reasoned essay to be referenced correctly). However, total overlap is just about impossible. It is hard to envision requiring a passionate speech from students about syllogistic logic, or assigning students a fallacy hunt in communications literature (which would rather undermine the course anyway). There will inevitably be some lack of assessment covering each of the major topics. Once again, this is particularly important if Bond wants to teach public speaking, since an improvement in this field requires practice and speeches no way around it. I also think that maintaining some density of assessment for Reasoning Skills is necessary; the initial introduction to syllogistic logic took time and practice for a great number of my peers, and I cannot see a way around this given that the quality of teaching was already so high in this subject. Assessment quantity is even more important in the latter half of the semester, which revolves around spotting fallacies that arent immediately apparent or arise casually in everyday conversation. Development and retention of such a skill simply cannot occur without practice through bulk assessment on that particular topic, which will be sacrificed in the proposed changes. Gut Instinct on Student Reaction The subjects which these proposed changes are attempting to merge depend heavily on lecturer charisma. The term public speaking reminds new students of monotonous high school oral presentations, and any confirmation of that stigma will damage the subject. Similarly, it takes a particularly charismatic lecturer to make students care about (or at least tolerate) syllogistic logic, fallacies, referencing and essay writing. Unless Bond is confident that they possess a lecturer who is passionate and educated about all these subjects, these changes would be disastrous, and I suspect most students (particularly those who know Mike or Russell, if they were removed from their positions) would hate the subject for this reason alone particularly ruinous as a first impression and core subject. I also believe that students would be dissatisfied with the subjects scatter mindedness and inability to stick to a central theme or subject. Most will later recognise that the subject did not develop their public speaking or reasoning skills adequately.

2. Self-management, Teamwork, and Leadership The major themes suggested for this subject are at best unclear, and at worst disappointingly reminiscent of motivational speeches and failed high school personal development classes. I am interpreting this subject as covering similar content to Leadership, Organisational Behaviour, and the Life One programs that were (and may still be?) offered at Bond, all of which I took part in. I do not believe that such a program has a place as a Core at Bond University. Efficacy I do not believe that the programs listed above are particularly effective, and therefore doubt Bonds ability to deliver a further subject along those lines satisfactorily. The major problem I saw in those programs was that the lecturers / tutors / presenters did not manage to achieve student retention and active use of the concepts involved in the program. For example, students are frequently (in more subjects than listed above) given tools that are appropriate and effective for conflict resolution, or delegating tasks, or making decisions. I had the opportunity to work with fellow students who had also been given these tools earlier in their degrees, and in some cases with students who I had paired with while we were learning these tools and had thus used the tools with them before. Yet despite this education, and upon review of my old coursework, I almost never found myself using those tools and frameworks again. Indeed, I have talked to friends now in the workforce about this issue, and have only ever received responses indicating that such tools are literally never used again. I should clarify that I do not blame the lecturers / tutors / presenters for this issue; it is certainly a failure of students to reference their prior education, and a lack of discipline on our behalf. Nevertheless, I cannot in good conscience support making a program that will teach content that will in 95%+ of cases never be used part of the core curriculum. Content Courses that attempt to teach subjects like group work and personal development repeatedly encounter a certain flaw, which is that most of the content turns out to be self-evident or entirely inapplicable. I am entirely unconvinced of Bonds ability to overcome this error; if anything, compared to my experience in other programs which cover these themes, Bond tends to make this error more. For instance, in the Leadership subject at Bond, almost all of the content taught could be separated into two general categories. The first category was content that was absolutely true, but entirely useless; the advice given to us on leadership revolved around such themes as inspiring your followers, leading by example, and resolving conflict. (On that note, why was Public Speaking not proposed as a merger with this class? Public Speaking has a lot more parallels with leadership than with syllogistic logic and fallacies.) While this is all necessary, it is nothing that students did not know before entering this class, or could not have figured out themselves in a brainstorming session. Many of my peers left class feeling that we hadnt really learned anything new. The second category of content was ambiguous advice. For instance, we were informed that sometimes being authoritarian works, and sometimes it doesnt; delegating work is effective on occasion, but other times not; these brilliant leaders involved their follows, but these equally brilliant leaders did not. I believe that I left Leadership more confused and uncertain than when I came in (at no fault of my lecturer, Anthony, who was one of my favourites at Bond). Similar issues plagued my Organisational Behaviour class, the Life One program, and in fact were present to an extent in all my classes at Bond which covered this subject. This is not to say that I did not enjoy those classes I did. But I do not believe that Bond teaches these subjects to a sufficient standard that they are capable of being made into a core subject.

There is content in these programs that is novel and effective and should be used again, but as I noted earlier, it tends not to be. The only students who retain and use such information are those that are particularly interested in the subject and unusually motivated to use what they learn in it (in which case, they likely learn about personal development in their spare time anyway, and have already seen most of the course content, as was my case). These are the students that would take these subjects as electives anyway, and they are the minority. If this program were to be made a core, the vast majority of students would forget (or, at least, neglect) the entirety of the content from this program, and Bond would not produce more graduates skilled in these areas than it currently does. This is precisely the sort of situation that electives are designed for, and I do not see sufficient reason to change the status quo in this regard. Format One aspect of courses like Leadership and Organisational Behaviour that I did appreciate was its seminar format. Every session had a small class size, meaning everyone knew each other and produced a relaxed atmosphere. I think this is important in the context of such subjects, since such an atmosphere is most conducive to actual demonstrations of teamwork and leadership. We all had plenty of time to get to know each other (there being several icebreaker sessions and assessments), which did aid the self-exploration segments of these programs. By making this class a core (especially under the proposed system where there would be only one core, not a choice between two), Bond would halve the time spent in a tutorial / seminar atmosphere. Instead, students would now be spending half their time in a crowded lecture, which would put in place numerous barriers to developing leadership and teamwork. For starters, lectures are necessarily less interactive in nature, which limits student involvement. Increased crowd pressure prevents people from speaking out, and a lower proportion of students actively get involved in discussions (as compared to most tutorials). There would also be less time for students in that class to get to know each other. Students would make friends with their fellow tutorial members, but would only be able to quietly interact with a choice few during the lectures. If this class were made a core (bringing with it a lecture format), students would lose half the time they would otherwise spend greatly interacting with fellow tutorial members that nevertheless sit on the periphery of their awareness and friendship circle. The lecture system does have advantages and uses which overcome this problem a large percentage of the time, but not in a subject that emphasises friendship and co-operation and self-exploration (which is most often done, I find, by talking to others). This shift would also take away in-class time to be spent on groupwork, which is commonly allocated in a seminar format but probably wouldnt be in a lecture / tutorial format. As a result (and judging from classes I have add in which in-class time was not allocated), students will likely do the bare minimum of groupwork as it is work outside of class, which obviously hinders a class attempting to encourage teamwork and leadership. A seminar format in which class time is given to compulsory groupwork would work better for this subject, and that would most likely require the class to exist as an elective. Gut Instinct on Student Reaction If my experience with the other programs Bond offers with the same central themes holds true, most students will dislike this program, regardless of whether it is taught well or poorly. Upon entering university, most students will not want to learn that they are being forced to take a subject titled SelfManagement, Teamwork and Leadership; all three of those topics are practically code for waste of time, the stigma being built into them from high school. The subject will most likely be regarded as a bludge (easy) subject. Most students will come away with similar complaints to mine. They may, however, regard the subject as more fun and entertaining than I did, particularly if it is taught by a good lecturer.

3. Ethical Thought and Action This seems to be Cultural and Ethical Values under a different name. I am in favour of this course remaining a core, and appreciate the proposed addition of themes discussing how to take effective action, and specific issues such as business ethics or bioethics. From my experience with Cultural and Ethical Values, this is a subject that absolutely requires an interesting lecturer. I had Damian, and loved the subject, while some of my peers a semester later informed me that they had a rather less interesting lecturer and hated the subject as a result. Otherwise, I have no particular opinion on the proposed change, since it is not a particularly drastic one (or at least, so it seems to me). Gut Instinct on Student Reaction Students will largely feel the same way they currently do towards Cultural and Ethical Values. I suspect they will also appreciate the practicality of the suggested changes, providing they are taught well. I do not know whether students will appreciate it remaining a Core or not.

4. Creating Career Capital This subject strikes me as a dramatic change in Bond Universitys core philosophy. Under the status quo, Entrepreneurship is a compulsory subject encouraging students to start their own business or ventures. These proposed changes would seemingly remove Entrepreneurship as a core and replace it with Creating Career Capital, a compulsory subject encouraging students to get a job and spend their spare time trying to impress employers. While I recognise that the vast majority of Bond students will and do get jobs, this still represents a radical departure from Bonds formerly entrepreneurial spirit (and determination to instil this in all its students), which I regarded as a source of competitive and reputational advantage above other universities. Career Development Centre Bond has already established a Career Development Centre, which already provides literally every desired function of this proposed subject. In a very literal sense, then, the creation of this subject would be an attempt by the university to force students to use a service which it already provides as an option. This will probably not be popular. That said, I understand the value of forcing students to use this service. Many students are simply too lazy or unmotivated to go about creating a decent resume, or seek work experience, or join extracurricular activities. While many students do set about rectifying this when they are close to graduation, there is value to the student in forcing them to do it earlier. However, the creation of a compulsory subject specifically for this purpose, and orchestrating core changes around this subject, is a confusing move when Bond already has a facility in place for providing these services. A compulsory subject will not provide a better resume or a better understanding of the job search process than a potentially compulsory (or heavily recommended and advertised) appointment with the Career Development Centre before graduation. There has been little communication with the students about exactly why this shift is taking place. If this subject can be taken at any point during the degree (which I am assuming is the case from the Semester 1 to end of degree descriptor in the proposal I saw), then surely the Career Development Centre is at no risk of being overloaded by a flux of first-year students. In any case, if the installation of this subject would be capable of dealing with hundreds of students per semester attempting to use these functions, then why does the Career Development Centre not have the same potential? Can the university not simply allocate the additional resources and staff it would require to the Career Development Centre and book students in for a compulsory appointment? Changing the entire core curriculum seems like overkill when a much simpler solution presents itself. As an extension of that previous point, who exactly will be teaching this subject? The best qualified people would seem to be the staff currently operating the Career Development Centre. If they become the lecturers for this new subject, then the proposed change would be a meaningless shift, putting the same staff in a lecture theatre instead of an office. If they do not become the lecturers for this new subject, then the problem is even worse forcing students to be taught by less qualified instructors. The most salient aspect of this change to me, and other students is that there simply seems to be no reason for such a drastic change to our core curriculum when the desired goals could easily be achieved by requiring students pay a visit to the Career Development Centre. Resume Building There is some validity to a proposed change that would force students to look for work experience, or get internships, or take up extracurricular curricular activities, or otherwise improve themselves (though the proposal disappointingly labels this creating career capital instead). I do not necessarily believe that it is the role of a university to make such activity compulsory, but I can see the value in it. Creating Career Capital, however, would not be an effective vehicle for enforcing such a change. This

would be far better done either through the existing Career Development Centre, as highlighted earlier, or through a faculty-specific equivalent subject or information nights. The Career Development Centre is useful for generic skills, such as resume writing or job searching or learning interview procedure. However, individual lecturers, tutors and staff within specific faculties are far more capable of providing students with information and guidance on other aspects of employment, such as work experience, internships, and desired extracurricular activities. This is true for a variety of reasons. Firstly, there is simply a knowledge limit in place. Any individual lecturer or tutor that a student may have under Creating Career Capital cannot, for example, have knowledge about every single potential internship available to the diversity of students they will be teaching, from Law to Psychology to International Relations. While they may be able to put together a list of potential opportunities, the chances are that this list will be significantly limited and will have no value judgements or insider information attached to it. Instruction to students on how to look for such opportunities themselves may be useful, but certain opportunities circulate almost entirely via word of mouth, or are given based on a mutual acquaintance. In this regard, it is much more useful for a student to simply talk to lecturers and tutors within their faculty than to visit the Career Development Centre. Transforming the Career Development Centre into a subject named Creating Career Capital would not change this. Secondly, lecturers and tutors within a students faculty are able to suggest better and more appropriate opportunities to students. A students assignment or speech or personality may suggest opportunities that a Career Development Centre (or Creating Career Capital) staff member would not recall or suggest based off the students resume or a quick chat with them about their interests. While Creating Career Capital would extend the amount of time students spent with a career adviser, per se, the relationship a student has with someone they perceive as a career adviser is necessarily different in nature to the relationship they have with someone they perceive as an expert in a field they are specifically interested in. Students open up more with tutors than they do with Career Development Centre staff, and this will not change with a rebranding to Creating Career Capital. Thirdly, faculty members are able to give more relevant and useful advice in general than a career adviser. In a highly hypothetical example, a career adviser may be able to tell a student that a certain accountancy accreditation would look great on their resume, but only an accountancy professor would be able to tell that same student that a certain accounting firm prefers internships over accreditation, and the student would be able to better focus their time gaining work experience instead. These factors make me question why this change is being implemented through a subject taught to all students, when a faculty specific subject (or information night / online portal / etc.) would benefit students so much more, without disrupting the entire core curriculum. Such a shift would also provide more value than the Career Development Centre does, which might even justify it as a compulsory subject within a specific major. As noted, however, I believe an elective system would still be better, if this were to become a subject at all. Gut Instinct on Student Reaction I suspect most Bond students are savvy enough to make the first conclusion I made here; namely, that Bond is forcing them to use a particular service the university ought to provide as an option instead (especially given that not all students will require it). They will probably dislike the subject as a result, particularly as it is reminiscent of the process they have most likely just gone through in high school with career advisers they may have despised. Particularly driven students may retrospectively conclude that their lecturers and tutors were of more value in assisting their career than this subject was. Unmotivated students who did not ask their lecturers and tutors about possible opportunities at all may appreciate the subject doing the work for them. Some students will appreciate the help, and rate the subject well as a result, but these are likely the students that would have gone to the Career Development Centre anyway, and asked their

lecturers and tutors about potential opportunities; they may think they are being given value, but they really are not. Above all, I suspect students will question and be irritated by the lack of allocation of credit points to this subject. I personally havent heard too much about the justification for this; I assume it gives 10 credit points back to the faculties to do with as they wish. But what will they do with it? If they make students complete an extra subject for 10 credit points, potentially making them stay on an extra semester just to complete one subject (or take 5 subjects in one semester), students will be irritated by Bonds apparent inability to set a consistent, well-structured workload. If faculties value existing subjects more highly, making them essentially compulsory in order to complete a degree, nothing is really achieved. If such a subject is that important, it is probably compulsory (or almost always taken anyway) and students will end up with exactly the same program as before, except one subject is now worth 20 credit points rather than 10. Why not just make these subjects compulsory instead? Students will be mostly confused by such variety in credit points allocated to various subjects, particularly new students, who wont be aware that it evolved as a result of giving credit points back to faculties.

Holistic View of the Core Changes The current system, as listed on Bonds website (and as I experienced at Bond) is as follows: Status Quo Communication Skills Communication Skills (CORE11-100) or Public Speaking (CORE11-110) Proposed Changes (with opinion) Merged into one, along with Reasoning Skills, limiting student choice and teaching efficacy why? May remove Mike Grenby, extremely popular lecturer.

Knowledge and Critical Thinking Knowledge and Society (CORE11-114) or Business Applications of Information Technology (CORE11-111) or Reasoning Skills (CORE11-112) or Scientific Thinking and Research Skills (CORE11-113)

All gone. Reasoning Skills merged with two other subjects, as above. Disappointing to see the proposed changes think so little of critical thinking. May remove Russell McPhee, extremely popular lecturer.

Responsibility and Ethics Cultural and Ethical Values (CORE11-120) Contemporary Issues in Law and Society (CORE11-121)

Contemporary Issues in Law and Society is gone. CEVs remains largely the same.

Leadership, Initiative and Teamwork Strategic Management (CORE11-130) or Entrepreneurship (CORE11-131

All gone. Replaced with a selfdevelopment, teamwork and leadership core whose topics bear little resemblance to anything taught in prior subjects. I am not confident that this will be useful.

Career Development Centre and talking to lecturers / tutors about opportunities

Compulsory equivalent for no credit points. More than a little irritating to students.

The proposed changes seem to me largely a case of throwing the baby out but bizarrely keeping the bathwater. If people complained about the Communication Skills segment, why keep it, merge it into one, and not give students any choice at all about which lesser evil to take? Why is Reasoning Skills being merged into that segment? Why has Bonds business education become non-compulsory (or axed) and replaced with compulsory advice about getting a job, which is already offered at the Career Development Centre? This proposal raises more questions than it answers, and will create more complaints than it satisfies. Out of every student and peer I have talked to about the proposed changes, not a single response has indicated anything other than confusion and annoyance. It is true that people resist change; nevertheless, I think such sentiments are justifiable here. It is clear that the proposed changes are wellintentioned. Nevertheless, the justification behind some of the proposals is either utterly indiscernible or poorly reasoned.

I am surprised to see so many previous cores axed entirely, particularly the more popular and clearly useful ones. I suspect this proposal has come about mostly as a result of complaints made by a particularly vocal minority, and, judging by the inclusion of Creating Career Capital, a very careerfocused one that sees no value in anything that does not explicitly further, for example, a law career. Yet there is value in making everybody study subjects like Reasoning Skills and Public Speaking and Entrepreneurship, and they in particular ought not to be axed or removed from core status. These are important skills and formative ideas that ought to sit in every students mind. Even a subject which I presume may be unpopular and the source of complaints, such as Communication Skills (though I did not take it) may merit inclusion as a core despite the complaints of a vocal minority. While an individual student may already communicate well, for example, there is value in being able to say they have studied it before, even if they found it easy. There is even greater value in having graduated from a university which has a reputation for consistently producing highly literate graduates, as one is assumed to conform to that standard without necessarily having to prove it first. That is not to say that this is definitely the case, and some core subjects may definitely deserve to be axed. Rather, I merely state that such an enormous difference from the status quo under this proposal is probably symptomatic of an overemphasis on complaints made about these subjects, and an undervaluing of the utility they provide. Bond has core subjects for a reason, and a certain for the greater good philosophy applies. It is important that students are taught some of the topics that would be axed under this proposal even if they dislike them. Employers do not hire graduates because they had fun during their studies; they hire graduates because they think well and possess useful skills. Does the current core system have problems? Certainly. But these proposed changes are not the solution. A healthy fix to these problems does not involve an incomprehensible (in the sense of understanding and justification, not verbosity or linguistics) proposal that most students are entirely unaware exists, and involves the removal of much loved subjects (Reasoning Skills, etc.) and a drastic turnaround in the universitys core philosophies (entrepreneurship vs employment). Until Bond can form a proposal which indicates at least majority support among students (which must stem from better communications surrounding the proposals, rather than a focus group and deadline for feedback that no-one was aware of, and an undervaluing of TEVALs in the decision making process), these changes should not be implemented.