Questionnaire Findings (Teacher Survey)
 

Q.A3a. How would teachers define Academic advising?

 

• Academic Matters Only: Many professors seem to believe that academic advising is for academic matters only and that an academic advisor is a facilitator of information that helps students with issues related to their academic life. It includes work such as providing advice in choosing major electives, providing help when students encounter general academic problems (e.g., a sudden drop in GPA, facing probation/discontinuation/disciplinary actions). It also involves helping students understand their academic potential and strengths; to help them work on their weakness (which would involve non-academic distractions); and to instill confidence in their own abilities.

 

• Career Guidance: There is also a common opinion that academic advising also includes career guidance. Academic advisors guide students on career goals and how to achieve them. Accordingly they also guide them to relevant courses, electives and minors.

 

• Holistic Care: A common notion also persists that an academic advisor acts like a ‘safety net’ for students when they do not know where to turn to. Academic advising goes beyond just academic matters. It does not just include providing advisees with advisement and support about educational matters but also any other issues which might negatively influence academic performance. It involves developing a close relationship with the advisee or mentee and helping them overcome all kinds of issues including personal ones. For example, student might need help with peer pressure, family issues, life on campus and personality development. It includes ensuring a pastoral welfare is maintained irrespective of the context of the student's personal circumstances to maximize learning. The goal of advising is to be a companion with the student at time they are in difficulties and participate in their growth as a facilitator. Some find it to be a very rewarding experience to witness students' academic and personal growth.

 

• 2-way Street: The other belief is that this is a 2-way relationship and just like evidence-based practice, students also have a very important role and say in how 'issues' are to be resolved. In other words, they need to take responsibility of the identified issues, if any, and participate actively in finding a solution or strategies. For example, in a Master course, students are usually more mature/ have more academic and/or working experience and they bring this with them to the course and to their cohort. They are also training to attain a clinical and professional qualification in two years.

 

• Pastoral Care: Many academic advisors provide more of a pastoral care to the students. It basically is to help students whenever they come sharing their problems and see how they can be helped in the advisor’s capacity or refer students to seek help from other relevant departments which are more appropriate to help. Academic advising is more about fostering a close relationship which lasts beyond a given period of time. For example, an advisor had seven cases to follow in the first semester of 2018-2019 and some cases are still active ones in his list. Most cases were related to family matters and emotional issues of some kind - academic is not the only reason for their emotional issues.

 

• Advising Methods: Some advisors let their students know that they can approach them with anything anytime. While, some only focus on academic matters. Some follow slightly more creative methods such as diary writing. An advisor asks his students to write him a diary / free writing to share their thoughts and feelings or reflections they have about current affairs or something has happened to them in their daily life. From their writings, he learns what they are thinking, why they have certain thoughts and how experience has affected the way they think or behave in school. And diary writing practice helps him identify students with special needs and students who needs special care and learn their personalities and characters. He believes knowing his students and learning them and their families is very important.

 

 

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Q.A3b.  Do Academic advisors set any goals and objectives in their advising?

 

• Performance Tracking: Some advisors keep track of students' academic performance (GPA) and keep contact with them through email.

 

• Need-based goals: Some advisors only make goals when a student has a problem. If a student has a problem, then they sit down and create a plan which involves specific actions and deadlines. Before the coronavirus outbreak, an advisor set goals for each semester. E.g. Identifying research topics / first draft for project XX etc.

 

• No Goals: Many are of the belief that it is not necessary to set goals. Students also do not see this advising as a goal-oriented activity. They just want some views and advice and only to mainly to establish a friendly and supportive atmosphere so that students feel comfortable to share their thoughts and problems. Another advisor is burdened by his teaching load and thus does not have goals for his mentee. Some let students explore in the context of knowledge and their interest, and help students overcome hurdles on their academic journey.

 

• Time Tables: Many advisors use timetables as a guideline reference to identify students with issues as early as possible, so that intervention can provided and to help students in identifying their interests and strengths, by providing recommendation to their major electives selections in short-term, and to their career development in long-term.

 

• Daily Notes: Advisors ask students to ensure everyday study time and write their own deadline reminder.

 

• Ensuring Appropriate Resources: Some advisors have goals to make sure that students have a sensible person to talk to about their course issues, career dilemmas, and other issues that stand in the way of a fulfilling educational experience. They do this by identifying advisees' current status and needs and by providing as much information as possible.

 

Q.B2. What are the major difficulties of Academic advisors when serving the role of academic advisor at CUHK? 

 

• Insufficient Knowledge: Some advisors feel they do not have sufficient knowledge on some academic areas or sufficient industry experience in the field, which may disappoint his advisees when they come to them for seeking advice.

 

• Distinction between Academic and Non-Academic Counselling: An advisor feels that every professor is expected to have some kind of natural ability to counsel students on all matters of academic and non-academic life. This is where the distinction between academic and non-academic counselling often becomes blurred. He struggles with some of the personal issues that come up with students (e.g. psychological problems) because he is not a professional counsellor and was not trained to be one and does not have the skills that are necessary to deal with these delicate issues. The implications of mishandling these cases can be very serious. Advisors can refer students to other services that can provide professional help for serious cases. However, students bring up personal problems with academic advisors because they want their advisors to help - they want the issue to be kept confidential and so will often refuse referrals.

 

• Students do not share: If the students don't open up, it is difficult to be a good advisor. It may be too intrusive to probe. Students are often not willing to come to meet with advisors even though they send out invitations and organize group lunches try to provide an easier environment to talk.

 

• Language Barrier: Language could also be a barrier, particularly if the academic advisor can only speak English. Some of the students are really weak in their spoken English!

 

• Large number of students but limited time: Advisors have a Large number of advisees but very limited meeting time.

 

• Lack of Inter-Faculty experiences: It would be better if academic advisors can have some experiences  across different faculties. When students whose academic interests do not fit the advisors are assigned as a supervisee, both parties will struggle a lot.

 

• Lack of formal infrastructure : A formal infrastructure is important to offer pastoral care.
   

• Advisors get less real time information from the system on their advisees, for instance, teachers can only  get the report of the students' mid-term scores or other issues till the situation gets really bad.

 

• Admitting Weaknesses: Students are considered as elite students at universities and it is not easy to convince them to admit that they have problems such as doing things beyond their capacities. I have cases in which students are already taking sleeping pills and they have difficulties managing everyday activities. Still they insisted to get on with their studies. It is not easy to accept help, as outsiders have a perception that top grade students should not have any problems or emotional issues. Also university students legally are considered as adults, but they are actually still in a very delicate transitional period to adulthood. A balance between treating them as adult and a teenager is important when handling cases which require special care.

 

• Secondary School Setting: It is also not easy to keep track of their emotion which fluctuates very quickly. An Advisor felt like a class teacher back in secondary school setting. For example, a student lost her emotion in another lecture and he was told to find out more about what happened. Though he followed his cases quite closely it was quite surprising that the setting is like in secondary school, except more support is available in secondary school and teachers can also reach out to parents very easily in secondary school setting. But at university level, though situation is very similar, support network is different from secondary school setting.

 

• Allocation Period: Academic advisees are allocated year by year. It is hard to follow up. A SEN student's mother shared that he would like his son to be taken care of by one academic advisor rather than changing  every year.

 

• No training: Advisors have no training whatsoever;  and have not been told at all what they are expected to do or achieve. Investing time and effort in training would make little sense as this is only a very small part of their job – For example, an advisor only advises 11 students. Requiring every teacher to engage in advising make much sense: it would be far more effective to have a few teachers investing the time and efforts to develop the skills needed to be effective advisers.

 

• Insufficient qualities for an advisor: Not every teacher is necessarily capable of (or interested in) being a good adviser. For instance, an advisor does not speak Cantonese or Mandarin, which creates a language / cultural barrier with most of his advisees; and, as he has not practiced law in Hong Kong (unlike many of his colleagues), he is usually rather unhelpful when students ask for career advice. Some of his colleagues who have a much more effective relation with students and know far more about their career prospects would be far more useful than he is.

 

• Graduate VS Undergraduate Advisees: Some undergraduate advisees do not take the academic advising scheme seriously. They refuse to meet  and never reply to messages requesting a meeting, which is very frustrating and disrespectful. By contrast, there are never any problems with meeting graduate advisees. IA suboptimal attitude towards learning and immaturity are the most important obstacles for undergraduate students to meet their advisors.

 

Q.D3. In views of the current special circumstances since Nov (social movement and now the spread of coronavirus), we would like to find out whether Academic advisors think CUHK has given enough support during crisis. 

 

• Not Adequate Support: The university has tried to be supportive but the actual support that has been providing to students and teachers are not enough. To name an example, while the RES decided to adopt Pass or Fail grade for Term One and Two in the previous semester, neither students nor professors have been given sufficient information.

 

• Counselling Services: The University organized good emotional support training programmes to cope up with the unique circumstances.

 

• Flexibility to Employees: Given the current circumstances, costs and risks of traveling have accelerated since last November. Being more flexible in terms of HR regulation and the work-from-home regulation like other internationally renowned universities will enable employees to focus more on their tasks at hand and work more efficiently.

 

• More Support to Students: More support could have been offered, especially to students.
   

• There is a lot of uncertainty in the air and keeping track of the students in terms of advising is tough. There are certainly groups of students who got caught up in the events and were mostly quiet about it but were not sufficiently protected or supported by the University.
   

• Social movement : It was a challenging time and with suspension of classes during that period, it made it even more difficult to maintain relationships with the students. Students had their views on the movement and it was difficult to know whether to contact them directly or not about it. Support from the university would have been useful.

 

• COVID-19 - A lot of regular updates were given by CUHK and the Faculty of Medicine. As it was not a 'sensitive' issues unlike the social movement, it was more straightforward in terms of keeping in contact with students and maintaining that relationship through online platforms.

 

• Research Projects: Many academic staff  are suffering tremendously due to the COVID-19. For instance, many research projects involve CUHK students as human participants and have to be conducted at a lab located in the campus. Due to the outbreak, however, these research plans have to be postponed indefinitely, which causes a grave dilemma to researchers. A researcher was supposed to collect data from undergraduate students this Spring at a language lab, which has to be postponed to September at the earliest. Even some postgraduate students had to make drastic changes in their data collection plan, as they could not find enough participants for their studies. Considering that they have an expected graduation date, it became an urgent issue for them.

 

• International Conferences: International conferences are either being cancelled or do not accept presenters from travel-banned countries. It is undeniable that many academic staffs had to cancel their presentations as such, which must be taken into account when evaluating academic performances for this academic year.

 

• Online Teaching: While ZOOM is a great online learning platform, it is undeniable that teachers had to make necessary modification to their lesson plans, syllabi, grading criteria, etc., which takes a lot of time and energy. Compared to F2F teaching, online teaching inevitably takes more time for preparation, which serves as another barrier.

 

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