Anyone participating in a tutorial this semester has had to take note of the school’s departure from sponsor initials on contracts. Now, perhaps due to the ongoing Growth Plan-era struggle for standardization, students are required to fill out an additional Tutorial Description Form to be signed by both the sponsor and their advisor for every tutorial. All completed tutorial forms must accompany the contract in order to submit the contract itself.

Since this sudden change is fairly minor, it has largely been met with some confusion, but ultimately acceptance from students and faculty.

“Some professors have told me that even they didn’t know the switch was happening this semester and it jumped on them as well,” thesis student Cassandra Detrio-Darby said in an email interview.

The word that keeps popping up in the speculation of these new forms is “accreditation.” According to World Wide Learn, educational accreditation is “a term used to describe the process that institutions of higher education undergo to confirm they meet the strictest educational standards.”

“The switch was made by the registrars because they are trying to get a different (higher) type of academic accreditation for New College,” third-year Ormond Derrick said he heard directly from the Registrar’s Office, in an email interview. “The tutorial description forms allow for NCF to show the auditors, or whoever verifies the accreditation, the forms and thus demonstrate tutorials, internships or whatever at New College are actual things, since they aren’t listed on the Course Request System.”

New College’s Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs, Julie Morris, gave an extensive email interview regarding the tutorial forms.

“About 30 percent of the undergraduate instruction at New College is in the form of tutorials, a significant percentage,” Morris said. “Tutorials earn either a full unit or half unit of credit, but, prior to this semester, only the title of the tutorial was specified on the contract with no record of the tutorial objective or criteria for evaluation.”

Morris also brought up the fact that course objectives are outlined in their syllabi and that New College already has a form for the Independent Study Project (ISP) to describe its objectives, so the move to more thoroughly account for tutorials was a natural one.

According to Morris, the decision to utilize tutorial description forms arose from the process of designing e-contracts, which are being piloted this semester with the plan of rolling them out to everyone in the Spring Semester of 2019.

“One of the [e-contract] design questions had to do with tutorials. We decided to include a tutorial wizard with drop-down menus for the objective and the learning outcome/artifact for evaluation,” Morris said. “The paper form for Fall 2018 tutorials mirrors the e-contract tutorial wizard.”

Information gathered from worldwidelearn.com.