Rachel Yeates, Campus Carrier Managing Editor
SGA president Ree Palmer was willingly pied in the face at Tuesday night’s SGA meeting. The reason? Over 600 students voted in this year’s SGA Executive Board elections. But some of those students wouldn’t have been able to vote if it were not for the quick action of Palmer and SGA vice president of administration Matthew Murphy.
“By 9 o’clock the night of the election, we had 10 emails and many text messages,” Palmer said. “At that point, Matthew Murphy, who ran the elections, and I got together and we were like ‘something is going on here.”
The issue lay in the voting system. Students who had over 90 credit hours, even if they had no intention of graduating in May, were prevented from voting because of their pseudo-senior status.
“We are hoping, before a future election, that we can address this with IT,” Palmer said. “The way their system works is it can’t differentiate between a student’s graduation year and their credit hours, if it varies.”
In the meantime, however, Palmer and Murphy rushed to find a temporary solution.
“Using paper ballots in person was not the most desirable option, but at the point it was the only thing that we could think to give more students a better chance to be able to vote,” Palmer said.
They then sent an email proposal to Debbie Heida, dean of students and faculty adviser to SGA.
“I’m going to give a lot of credit to our senior SGA officers because they responded quickly,” Heida said. “There was a problem, [and] mostly I got informed ‘we’ve solved it.’”
While students have been affected by this voting system in the past, the numbers were nothing like those SGA saw this year, Palmer said.
“We called the Registrar and had them creatively do a list of students that were 90+ that were not on the graduation list,” Palmer said. “They were able to perform some excel magic and get us a list, and there are actually [178] this year, which completely broke any idea of precedent of what we thought might be in that category.”
That number represents third and fourth-year students with over 90 credit hours who will continue into the fall semester. While this voting block may have been more vocal due to the number of contested offices up for vote in this year’s election (a change from recent years when uncontested elections may have contributed to lower voter turnout, Palmer said), associate provost Andrew Bressette doesn’t see a drastic increase in the amount of outside credit hours students are bringing in.
“What’s interesting to me is you see [the average number of outside credit hours] actually going down,” Bressette said.
Data from the Office of the Registrar show that the average amount of Advanced Placement credit has been decreasing slightly since the class that entered in the fall of 2013 or third-year students. The changes are slight. Every class currently enrolled at Berry brought in an average of nine AP credit hours per student within a few decimal points.
Bressette thinks that the increase in perceived credit hours of the current junior class may have more to do with variance in class size. Palmer agrees.
“That class is over 100 people larger than my graduating class,” Palmer said. “That was the monster class, as we joked about it during SOAR.”
In areas like SGA voting and Residence Life, where credit hours are vital to a number of campus-sustaining practices, Bressette offers a potential solution.
“[SGA and Res Life] could think about shifting to using the student’s entering cohort year, which would then ensure that it’s not based on your hours, but it’s based on whether you’re a first-year, second-year, or third-year student,” Bressette said.
Whether or not this year is an indication of a trend, the dean and provost’s offices are preparing for the possibility of upcoming students bringing in a greater amount of outside credit. And the SGA office is working toward a voting system that will accommodate all students, although those solutions may not be put into place until next year.
“As far as class elections coming up, I’m not sure if we can do it by then, so it might be a paper ballot option for the 90+s,” Palmer said. “That’s one of the reasons we’re thankful class officer elections are happening a little later this time, so we do have a little bit of time.”