After completing the first year of Ethos, Summer Lashley, the director of this spiritual life program, evaluated the project and made changes, including additional Kudos credit for some events and potential academic probation.
“I want it to be called the Ethos Project because I want it to be just that,” Lashley said. “A project is something that I’m continually working on and tweaking and finding ways to improve. I plan to always do that.”
Before the first week of classes, Lashley sent an email to all students that detailed changes for Ethos, based on statistics, meetings and student feedback from last year.
“Summer sent out an email to certain students and asked their thoughts on the program and improvements and there was a lot of positive things,” Emily Kurt, Spiritual Life assistant, said. “A lot of people liked the idea of the options to do other things [than chapel].”
Some events will be worth more kudos than they were last year, according to Lashley.
“Some things should be worth more than one and we recognize that,” Lashley said. “In fact, I recognized it at the beginning but part of that strategy was to protect chapel and make it always a very attractive option. … Chapel didn’t die and people still go. Now that I have a little breathing room in that area, I’m really excited to be able to give [service projects] the value that they deserve.”
Lashley and Kurt said they saw a difference between upperclassmen and new students in reaction to the program last year.
“I think the learning curve was hard because a lot of the older students didn’t understand it at first,” Kurt said.
Lashley said she was most impressed with the amount of leadership from students she saw under the Ethos program. She said more than 1,700 students planned Ethos-related events.
“We would have never known about some of the great things that our students were doing and dreaming about, had it not been for the opportunity we gave them to be a part of it,” Lashley said.
Last year, students who did not complete their Kudos requirements at the end of the semester were required to make them up by listening to podcasts of sermons and other spiritual enrichment lectures.
“We got a lot of feedback about podcasts and no one likes the podcasts,” Lashley said. “We are trying something new.”
Incomplete requirements will now make students subject to other disciplinary actions, including academic probation that limits a student’s activity for up to a semester.
“We worked with Dean Bennett a lot this summer and he’s comfortable with the probation idea, so we’re going to try it,” Lashley said.
However, students who acquire 70 kudos per semester and lead an Ethos event may receive special recognition at graduation – a turquoise chord.
“It’s not just about racking up credits, it’s also about leading and being a student who takes lead of certain events and opportunities in the Ethos system,” Lashley said. “We’re looking for students who are exceeding their own expectations and ours and are willing to … mentor or disciple other people.”
Lashley said future plans for Ethos includes creating a co-curricular transcript.
“If you have all of this data being stored on your device, you should be able to translate that into something that might be valuable as you apply to graduate schools or specific kinds of jobs,” Lashley said. “Sometimes this can give a more holistic snapshot of a person than just their academic transcript.”
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