If I hear about an exam database one more time, I’m going to throw my stuffed octopus across the newsroom.
It’s a rote executive goal that has been reused year after year after year. While I suppose the executives who have campaigned on an exam database have seen success, who exactly is this exam database serving?
We had one a decade ago, back in 2015. The infrastructure had been built; the literal database was functional. Yet professors didn’t want to upload exams to the database.
Exams and other course materials are the intellectual property of professors — not the university. It is not as simple as the university deciding to do the database; professors are hesitant to release their IP into the wild west of copyright-violating academic material repositories or the insatiable maw of some plagiarism-laundering LLM.
The database died, unused and unloved.
This essay is part of Point of Inquiry, our AMS column. It is written by staff columnist Quyen Schroeder, a trained opinion journalist who also serves as The Ubyssey’s opinion editor.
Quyen isn’t impartial when they report on the AMS. With years of council attendance as context, she imagines a better future for our student union — one with meaningful advocacy and productive student engagement. When they go to council meetings, attend AMS protests and interview student politicians, they make it clear they are reporting as an opinion journalist.
Opinion essays are intentionally subjective and make no claims to impartiality. Otherwise, they are required to uphold the same ethical standards and undergo the same fact-checking process as everything else in The Ubyssey’s report. The views expressed in Point of Inquiry are Quyen’s and do not represent the views of The Ubyssey as a whole.
Executives of recent years — 2023’s Kamil Kanji, 2024’s Christian Kyle and 2025’s Riley Huntley, to name a few — all fancied themselves political necromancers. They promised to part the veil of death and revive the exam database, requiring only the student mandate that powers their mysterious magics. Apparently, three years of a mandate from students haven’t been enough for anyone to ponder the festering wound corrupting the heart of the exam database.
This year’s VP Academic and University Affairs Jaiya Panchi and President Dylan Evans also ran as exam database necromancers. From my conversations with Panchi, her exam database proposal seems no different from the one that failed in 2015. Between the two of them, there don’t appear to be concrete plans to address the IP issue — or at least not any that Evans was willing to share with Council.
After science councillor Angela Qian outlined these concerns at council last week, Evans didn’t respond with solutions. He informed us about the stage they were at: “preliminary consultation on a launch of a pilot” — which… el oh el. He described how they were addressing the IP concerns: “working behind the scenes to address some of those concerns.” If he was actually doing something, he might have given specifics about the addressments. He told us the current goal: “still trying to kind of push the project forward.” He couldn’t even share concepts of a plan to overcome the IP issue.
Perhaps this will magically be resolved! Or, maybe, magic isn’t real.
Recent years have brought exciting spin-offs of the exam database concept, including a syllabus database and a class notes database. Will wonders ever cease.
Is a syllabus database a legitimate goal? Seeing past syllabi before registering for courses could certainly be helpful.
The database’s implementation is clearly not a feasibility issue, technically speaking. UBC Learning Technology Innovation Centre built a syllabi database in a cave with a box of scraps. And it only took a couple of days during May’s Canvas breach.
However, in the long term, a syllabi database faces the same IP issues as the exam database. (Not to mention the questionable utility of potentially outdated syllabi. Or that a simpler solution exists: emailing the professor and asking.)
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This unoriginal goal-setting extends beyond an endless field of databases. Last year’s VP Student Life Kevin Heieis’s executive goals included reincarnating the Blue and Gold Society.
The first version of the Blue and Gold Society started in 1957, a rebrand of the Pep Club that sold Thunderbirds merch and organized halftime entertainment. The original organization was seemingly short lived — I didn’t find mentions of it in the Ubyssey archives after 1958. The group was reestablished in 2016 before petering out once again. But third time’s the charm, right?
Heieis’s Blue and Gold Society is not a society under B.C.’s Societies Act. It’s also not an official AMS committee. It’s just a medley of students concerned with student life chosen at Heieis’s discretion. They met a single time, on March 18. The “society” has no power to do anything other than meet and complain and spend $100 on snacks at the Gallery.
Did this benefit students? Even when I put aside my long-standing doubts about the necessity of a VP student life, I don’t think so. A once-yearly discussion about facility bookings and Thunderbirds spirit — topics UBC administrators are already aware of — is cute, but not a tool of change. This “society” needs continuity, regularity and clear goals. Right now, it has none of them.
But Heieis technically did raise a Blue and Gold Society from the grave. I’m sure that will look good on a résumé.
I enjoy nostalgia occasionally. However, perhaps our student government should not just seek to return to a fabled, ideal past state (which seems to be the mid 2010s.) We should look forward, not backward.
This year’s executives don’t do that — like those before them.
Evans is pursuing an exciting opportunity to “make UBC fun!” He’s investigating an AMS microbrewery — a referendum item from 2014 (no surprise) that never reached fruition (also no surprise).
Why is this a priority now? Youth alcohol usage is at a 20-year low. Perhaps I am a maximally sober buzzkill, but with a housing crisis, a climate crisis, a university funding crisis, a reader’s choice of geopolitical crisis and a food security crisis, is a microbrewery a timely focus for the UBC of today?
I’m not opposed to silly, low-stakes ambitions. But we don’t need to Weekend at Bernie’s a quirky idea from the last decade. We can imagine our own quirky ideas, thank you very much.
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While I’m not impressed by the decade-old goals, the new ones aren’t much to write home about either. Other than the VP administration and VP finance’s operational commitments, this year’s executive goals are utterly uninspired.
Some are undercooked, like Panchi’s proposal to extend the course add/drop deadline — apparently she hasn’t spoken with faculty or considered courses with early midterms.
Some are covering the failures of previous years. The 2026 VPSL is tasked with developing a “three-year strategic roadmap” for the VPSL office; the 2025 VPSL was tasked with developing a “multi-year strategic student life plan.” This year’s VPSL Matthew Ma Renzitti projects this three-year roadmap will take him a full year to complete.
Some are frankly just a beehive of buzzwords. “Maintain Accessible and Consultative Student Communication Pathways” is just a complicated way to say talk to students.
If this year’s goals inspire anything, it should be this: we need to be more ambitious.
