On 30 June 2020, the Open University of China (OUC) held the second meeting of the third session of the Academic Degree Evaluation Committee to deliberate and approve degree related work for the 2020 Spring Semester.
The meeting, held remotely via video due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was presided over by Jing Degang, secretary of the Party Committee and president and chairperson of the Academic Degree Evaluation Committee of the OUC, while the vice president, secretary-general, and members of the committee attended the meeting in person or via video. The heads of relevant teaching departments of the OUC Headquarters also sat in on the meeting as non-voting attendees. The meeting approved reports on the awarding of degrees and other degree related issues submitted by the sub-committees, and decided to confer 2,795 graduates, including Zhou Jianqiao, with OUC bachelor's degrees.
A total of 2,990 undergraduate graduates applied for bachelor's degrees this semester. After deliberation and voting, the OUC Academic Degree Evaluation Committee decided to confer 2,795 graduates with bachelor’s degrees, with 24 graduates denied bachelor's degrees and 171 applications rejected. In addition, at the request of the Literature and Arts sub-committee, the Academic Degree Evaluation Committee decided to revise the thesis writing and word count requirements for two majors, English and Business English.
Jing Degang responded to the questions and suggestions raised by members during the first meeting of the Academic Degree Evaluation Committee and proposed corresponding improvement measures, while also promising to continue to study the questions and implement suggestions raised by members of the current meeting. He pointed out that the OUC will make consistent efforts to improve the quality of degree papers, and that it has put forward three requirements for theses, namely, “adhere to an academic nature, enhancing applicability, and strengthen standardisation.”
During the spring semester of 2020, when all of China was in a critical period of epidemic prevention and control, the OUC, based on its student-centric principles and with the aim of ensuring the timely completion of degree awarding and safeguarding the interests of students, instructed its headquarters to ensure advance deployment and proper planning and its branch colleges to work together and proactively implement those plans. Under the premise of ensuring the quality of deliberation, all branches made full use of modern information technology to carry out online thesis guidance and remote video defence work. At the meeting of the Academic Degree Evaluation Committee, degree awarding progressed in an orderly fashion, ensuring that eligible graduates received their bachelor's degrees on time.
From 24-28 June 2020, the eight sub-committees of Literature and Arts, Law, Public Administration, Business Administration, Economics, Science and Engineering, Education, and Agroforestry and Medicine held separate meetings on the evaluation of degrees to consider and determine the list of students to be conferred with bachelor's degrees as recommended by their respective professions and held discussions on relevant degree work. All 110 members participated in the meeting.
By Zheng Xubing,OUC