The most important reason, perhaps, is that a SL subject is essentially a contract between PolyU and the partner organization and community. PolyU is committed to send out an agreed number of students to carry out the agreed service project. The partner organization is committed to facilitate our students’ execution of the project. Often this is done through making a number of members of the community available and accessible to our students. The partner has a reasonable expectation that there will be a certain number of well-trained students to carry out the project, to meet certain identified needs. If PolyU cannot make available the promised number of students at the appointed time, the members of community will be disappointed, and the needs will not be met. The consequence can be serious. Since these are, by definition, under-privileged members of the community and thereby vulnerable, PolyU may be causing material harm, in addition to disappointing the partner and the community. For this reason, a severely under-enrolled subject is highly undesirable. A cancelled subject could be a disaster, causing harm to the community and damaging the credibility of the university. We have witnesses many cases of these types of disasters, involving prestigious universities atom Hong Kong as well as foreign countries.
For these reasons we have to make accurate projections of the total number of student places needed for each semester. We then have to ensure that we provide roughly a 10% buffer over the number of places needed. If the number of places offered is too much in excess, some subjects may be severely under enrolled or even have to be cancelled. That would be a disaster for our partner communities as explained. It will also be stressful for the students who remain in the class because they may have to undertake extra tasks in order to deliver the service promised to the partner community. For cancelled subjects, students may have to defer fulfilling their SL Requirement, or to swiftly enrol in other SL subjects if available Either way it will cause a lot of disruptions to plans and necessitate difficult adjustments.
On the other hand, if we cannot offer sufficient places, it will disappoint a lot of students, generate resentment from students, cause problems for teachers who may be under pressure to increate class quota beyond what they have prepared for. Generally we can use a number of sources to make projections of the number of students expected to take SL in a particular semester. These include the size of each cohort, indicative program progression patterns, attrition rates, past enrolment numbers, etc. Generally we have to be fairly accurate in projecting the number of student places needed. If we under estimate too much, the student demand will not be met and we will have a lot of unhappy students on our hands. If we overestimate too much, we will disappoint our NGO partners and the community. Either way it is not a desirable situation. We will also have to offer a certain distribution of the types of SL subjects that roughly matches the students’ interests. More on that in later sections.
Because of the need to setup the service project with a NGO partner and community, it often takes several months to a year to setup a SL subject. If it is a long term partner the situation is better. Even then, there might be changes in personnel, the project itself, the needs of the community, and other factors that require further negotiations and preparations. Hence there is certain short term rigidity to the offering of SL subjects and student places - it cannot be changed easily in a short time. For example, it is generally not very easy to enlarge the class size of a SL subject drastically from 50 to 100, to accommodate an unexpected demand from the students.
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