Student Senate is on the fence with the Electronic Writing Portfolio.

“The EWP is a mess right now and it will take a while to fix it,” said Student Senate Speaker Isaac Sandidge. “I sat on the committee that had the survey for EWP a couple of years ago and it is still not fixed.”

Charles Delman, the Eastern chapter president of University Professionals of Illinois, came with two other faculty members to Student Senate a few weeks ago to address concerns.

Delman said the faculty problems with the EWP was that it interfered with the teacher and student relationships and imposed a system of evaluation that de-evaluated the teacher’s original copy of a paper.

Delman said a survey was sent out to all faculty members at the beginning of the year and the new EWP system was set up with the possibility of remediation for a student if they did not pass the EWP evaluation.

The EWP rubric is set up on a scale of 1-7 now instead of satisfactory and unsatisfactory.

“Also, students might get upset with the professor if they need remediation because they could blame the teacher for the poor evaluation they got through the EWP evaluation,” Delman said.

He went on to say this has built up during the years and reached the level where it is very troublesome.

“The requirements have shifted and faculty does not know if it is the student or curriculum that is being looked at and the way it is done has changed dramatically,” Delman said.

Also, the faculty’s concerns are that the EWP is supposed to gradually assess if a student improves during the years and a student who submitted all their EWP submissions at once would not be part of it.

“Experts in writing will tell you there are flaws,” Delman said. “You need to read and write to learn writing, but the EWP does nothing to encourage students to do more writing.”

Student Senate is not taking any action at the moment.

After Delman, along with two other faculty members, came and talked to Student Senate a few weeks ago, Chris Kromphardt, Chair of the Academic Affairs Committee, talked to Jackie Alexander, student vice president of academic affairs, and they both decided there would be no official proposal on how to change the EWP as of right now.

“Right now there is nothing really on it and the faculty members that came to discuss it did not mention any,” Kromphardt said. “If another group makes a proposal, we might act on it, but student government is not making the charge.”

Kromphardt said academic affairs would then discuss the proposal if it came up through another group and come up with a plan of action on it.

“My personal opinion is that it seems that there is not a lot of information out there about what is being done concerning EWP,” Kromphardt said. “All students have to turn papers in, but they do not know how they are graded, who reads them and so on.”

He said if students knew more about the EWP process, they would have a better view on it.

“Student Senate has no clear stance on what to do with the EWP because we do not know the whole picture,” Kromphardt said.

Heather Holm can be reached at 581-7942 or at haholm@eiu.edu.