UNBC Receives Best Mark Ever
By 250 News
Admin Building at UNBC (photo from UNBC's files)
Maclean's Magazine is out with its annual ranking of Canadian post-secondary institutes and the University of Northern British Columbia has had its strongest showing to date.
The facility atop Cranbrook Hill has secured 4th place in the category of "primary undergraduate" universities up from 7th spot last year, which had been the previous high.
Another notable, Maclean's has rated the university number one in terms of library acquisitions and in social science & humanities research.
U.N.B.C. spokesperson, Rob Van Adrichem, says the high mark is pretty amazing given that the university is just 11-years-old. He says the top three finishers in the category are all closer to the 150-year mark. And, they're all in the Maritimes, which, he says, is important because it means they're not really in direct competition with U.N.B.C. for students.
Van Adrichem says the local university is leaps and bounds ahead of its western competition, with the University of Winnipeg the closest, in 11th spot. As for northern institutes, Lakehead sits in 16th spot and Laurentian is 19th.
A couple of other positive notes about UNBC:
-Class sizes are among the smallest in western Canada, for example, 30% of first and 2nd year students are in classes of fewer than 25 people.
-The average entering grade of students coming to UNBC directly from high school is 82%, that is the 6th best in the nation, and the University placed 4th for the number of students who have won national awards.
Van Adrichem says it will probably be another two years before the Northern Medical Program is factored into the national magazine's criteria.
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If I recall correctly, the library acquisitions has always been a strong point and I know is very important for determining the quality of a University, even in this age of computers it seems.
It is also good to see that class sizes can be kept low. I took Economics 100 which was presented in an auditorium which sat over 600 ..... it was filled for the first few lectures and by mid semester it had conspicuously emptied to about a third. An introductory Sociology course with about 400 students fared no better. Luckily many learn better through reading anyway, making such lectures a waste of time for them until one gets into small groups and varying viewpoints can be debated which is really what University should be about.
As far as the 82% goes ... grade inflation over the decades is an interesting phenomenon. In Ontario it was shown to be in a large part attributable to the Ontario Scholarship program which provided scholarships to all those who achieved averages of 80% or over. Teachers would move those close to the border higher so that they could get the scholarship. There were 6 in my graduating year of about 150 academic grade 13 students. A generation later, in my son's class that rate had increased more than 5 fold.
http://gradeinflation.com
http://schoolmatch.com/articles/ESRJAN97.htm
http://www.sfu.ca/mediapr/sfu_news/archives_2003/sfunews05150314.html