Editor’s Note: Ashley Chen is a member of The Journal’s Editorial Board.

AMS Assembly met last Thursday over Zoom for its final meeting of 2020.

Assembly voted to ratify four new Judicial Affairs Deputies, including Yasmin Sawan, Tina Derak, Mia Sunner, and Dennis Gavriline for the upcoming semester. Ashley Chen was also ratified as an Elections Deputy.

As the term comes to a close and students enter the December exam period, the AMS is reflecting on a fall semester of remote learning and looking to use student feedback to improve remote delivery for the winter term.

The Society met with the Academics Operations Group in the last week of classes to discuss student feedback on remote learning collected through AMS and individual faculty surveys, according to Alexia Henriques, AMS vice president (university affairs).

“We got a lot of really great feedback and updates from various levels of faculty and [administrators] primarily regarding how all the student feedback that has been collected has been utilized and will be used in the coming semester to positively impact and change some issues that were experienced by students in their courses throughout this last year,” Henriques said at Assembly. 

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The AMS has requested Provost and Vice Principal (Academic) Mark Green and Vice-Provost (Teaching and Learning) John Pierce send out a mass email to let students know faculties have taken the feedback provided throughout the semester into consideration. 

Henriques also said the AMS is recommending Pierce hold another town hall meeting following the remote proctoring panel he held on Nov. 27. Henriques suggested a panel for any first-year students who may be struggling with the transition from high school to post-secondary education. 

Undergraduate Trustee Shoshannah Bennett-Dwara told Assembly about a new program called Interchange 2020. The program, which will be made available to Chinese international students specifically, will allow students to take course credits at their home institutions and have these credits transfer back to Queen’s. 

The program is different from an international letter of permission due to the absence of an application fee for students who wish to partake in the program, Bennett-Dwara said.

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In the discussion period, AMS Secretary of Internal Affairs Caroline Hart mentioned the AMS’s current efforts to revamp the AMS Policy Manual Three. Hart noted the new proposed name for the document is AMS Principles and Positions due to the document being transformed from a policy manual to a position paper.

Hart said the Society is reworking the document to better include topics of importance for students and other topics that may have been missing from the document on which the AMS should have a stance.

“We took the time to read the old Policy Manuel Three and we decided amongst ourselves what we thought were topics that were super prevalent to students as well as topics that were missing that we think the AMS should have a voice on,” she said. “We took it amongst ourselves to rewrite these stances with the student intention at its focus.”

The document is set to be voted on at the next AMS Assembly in January.

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