UNIVERSITY PRESS A THIRTEEN-TIME ASSOCIATED PRESS MANAGING EDITORS AWARD WINNER
The Newspaper of Lamar University and Lamar Institute of Technology Thursday, April 10, 2014
Vol. 90, No. 22
SGA election debate set for Friday, voting to begin April 21 LAUREN VAN GERVEN UP STAFF WRITER Student Government Association elections are set for the third week of April. Students will be able to vote from midnight, April 21, until noon, April 23.
Executive branch positions include president, vice-president and secretary/treasurer. Other positions include class senators for the sophomore, junior and senior class. Sabrina C. Lewis and Jasmine Michelle Morehead are candidates for president.
Ryan Dollinger is unopposed for vice-president. LaRissa Denise Wilson and Monim Ul Islam are running for secretary/treasurer. Running for class senators are Mikala Barlow DeVillier for sophomore class, Jussaniqua Lashae Simmons for junior class, and Antoine
Marvelle Crowder for senior class. All three are running unopposed. Voting will be open to all undergraduate and graduate students. “Voting is possible through the Lamar Banner,” Teresa Simpson, SGA staff advisor, said. “Voting will be open to the entire student body. However,
to vote for class senator, the student needs to belong to that specific class.” Campaigns began April 7, and will run through noon, April 23. There will be a debate, 2 p.m.-2.30 p.m. Friday, in 210 Setzer Student Center. See SGA, page 2
NEW MANDATES TO REQUIRE PROCTORU SOFTWARE FOR ONLINE COURSES LAUREN VAN GERVEN UP STAFF WRITER Starting in the summer, some online courses offered at Lamar University will require ProctorU, an online proctoring service. Proctoring and authentication requirement services are based on federal law and accreditation mandates. “It is requiring universities to make a good-faith effort to authenticate students, to make sure that they really are who they say they are.” Paula Nichols, division of distant learning executive director, said. Authentication is not a completely new concept to online classes at Lamar. “We’ve been doing that with the LU ID password in the past,” Nichols said. “But, the rule also says that as new technologies become available, colleges should increase their activity on authentication.” Nichols said although she believes that there is not more academic dishonesty online than there is on campus, the university needs to make sure, because online classes are still fairly new. Lamar has previously used online proctoring for exams that qualify students for state certification. “We’ve done that, and we’ve done that with success,” she said. “And after that, everybody agreed that it was time that we made more effort.” Currently, seven companies are involved in proctoring online courses. Some companies use fingerprint identification, retina scanning, or authenticate on a basis of public information. To work with ProctorU, no additional software or expensive material is required, Nichols said. “Students need to have a webcam and a microphone,” she said. “They will also need to hold up a picture ID. See PROCTOR, page 2
The old Brooks-Shivers Hall is being demolished to make room for the construction of the new Honors College and administration building.
UP Josh Aych
HONORS PROGRAM TO BECOME HONORS COLLEGE MOLLY PORTER UP CONTRIBUTOR Bricks tumble as tracked excavators rip into the walls of the old Brooks-Shivers Hall. The sounds of smashing and rumbling echo constantly throughout the campus. For many, the demolition is the first visible sign of the establishment of the new Honors College. However, many changes have been made behind the scenes to prepare for the transition from the 50-year-old Honors Program into the Honors College. Inaugurated in fall of 1963, the Honors Program has served Lamar’s students and, more recently, Mirabeau Scholars. On April 23, 2012, the Texas State University System Board of Regents voted to re-designate the program the Honors College to meet the growing needs of its students. “This Fall, we admitted that great big group (of Mirabeau Scholars),” Brenda Nichols, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said. “We’re going to kind of go back to more like what we’ve been doing, but what we have done is created levels of those scholarships. All of those levels require participation in the Honors Program. There’ll probably be almost 100, even though the
actual number of Mirabeaus will be smaller.” Nichols said that with a hundred new members, the regular groups and the people who apply for the Honors College, the program basically outgrew itself. “We’ve had growing pains,” she said. “Now we’re at a point in time, in terms of the university enrollment, in terms of the student profile, to really think about moving to the next step. We think enough of it. We think enough of our students, and we have so many. It needs to be a college.” President Kenneth Evans said the Honors College will provide an intellectually stimulating environment to Lamar’s students. “There will always be students in any campus who are simply scholarly, intellectually precocious, and want to be in an environment where they can talk about issues, they can explore material in greater depth and they can take opportunities to do projects in classes that extend beyond what would normally be the expectations in a standard curriculum,” he said. “This provides a venue where those students have a community of others that they can share and work with, and have faculty who are willing to participate in those kinds of products with them and explore with them material in much greater depth than might normally be the case in a classroom con-
text.” Evans said there was not an honors program at UC-Davis when he was an undergraduate student, but they permitted undergraduates to take graduate classes. “I was able to take Ph.D. classes in political science, a couple of them, and it gave me opportunities to be in context where I really got to stretch myself, to explore material and adapt, that I otherwise would have never had the chance to do in a normal undergraduate course,” he said. “Frankly, it’s probably what pulled me into an academic life. If I hadn’t had that, I don’t know if I would have done it. It was so enticing. The stimulation I had was more than I can possibly explain. So that’s what I’m hoping an honors college provides our students.” The new designation will change the stature of the program, and its relevance and importance to the university, Evans said. “The dean now has a seat with the other deans at the university and is now formally designated as such,” he said. “Some of it has to do with the scheduling of classes — trying to make sure that you get enough faculty delivering classes in different programs — and that the
LU to adopt guaranteed price plan in fall 2014 LAUREN VAN GERVEN UP STAFF WRITER Starting in the fall, incoming freshman will have the opportunity to prescribe to a guaranteed price plan where students will pay the same amount of tuition and mandatory fees for 12 consecutive semesters. “The idea originated in the legislature,” Cruse Melvin, vice president of finance and operations, said. “It was one of those things that came down, saying that the institution should provide a guaranteed price plan, so that someone signed up for this plan would be guaranteed tuition and mandatory fees at a fixed rate.” Variable fees, such as parking pass fees, or specific program fees, are not included in the guaranteed price plan.
See HONORS, page 2 See PRICE, page 8
www.facebook.com/UPLamar
www.lamaruniversitypress.com
www.twitter.com/UPLamar