2012 S1 Mentor Program Report - Unilife - Curtin University

START Mentor Program
mentoring.curtin.edu.au
Introduction
There are currently approximately 20 different Schools and areas that have a mentor program - mainly at course
level (apart from the faculty wide program in Curtin Business School and Centre for Aboriginal Studies). As
mentioned above, semester 1, 2012 marked the first time in the mentor program where mentors could be
drawn from previous mentees across the whole campus. (The Information Studies courses under the school of
Media, Culture and Creative Arts do not currently participate in the Mentor Program). Approximately 7000 new
students were assigned to Mentors in the participating schools. Mentees were assigned in a typical ratio of one
Mentor to 15 Mentees.
To evaluate the impact of the program, the Mentors and the Mentees within these schools were asked to
provide feedback at the end of semester via short surveys. These surveys were updated from previous years,
with the advice of the Curtin Teaching and Learning Evaluation Team, in order for questions and responses to be
clearer and data more useful.
For the Mentees, the survey was anonymous, and completion of a survey sheet was voluntary. A total of 1223
responses were collected in lectures and online from Mentee students in the 20 courses involved. These data
was then entered into a Qualtrics survey. We are confident that this is a representative sample of all Mentees.
All of the Mentors who participated in the program were required to submit their evaluation on line through a
Qualtrics survey as part of their Mentor agreement. In total 342 surveys were collected from the Mentors.
There have been no complaints or issues with regard to Risk Management, Duty of Care or inappropriate
behaviour. The only negative feedback received from Mentees relate to their Mentor being difficult to contact
or not contacting them enough. The major concern for Mentors is the same as previous years – they believe the
program is a fantastic opportunity and enjoy the experience, but mentees don’t respond as much or as often as
they would like. This is the reality of a large scale system – not all Mentees will require assistance, and not all
Mentors will work as hard as expected, but with over 22% nominated as Outstanding by their Mentees, the
program can be considered extremely successful and the overwhelming majority of Mentors competent to say
the least.
Feedback from Mentees
The impact of the Mentors on Mentees’ decisions to persist at Curtin
A key goal of the Mentor program is to improve student retention, and to determine if the program is achieving
this goal, a persistence question is asked directly of Mentees. Students were asked “Were you at any point
considering withdrawing from Curtin?”, then the follow up question, “If Yes, did your mentor make any
difference to your decision to continue at Curtin?”
Fourteen per cent of the students surveyed had considered withdrawing and of those, 17% believed that their
mentor assisted with their decision to stay at Curtin. The results are shown in Tables 1 and 2 below.
Table 1: Mentees Considering Withdrawal
12. Were you at any point considering withdrawing from Curtin?
# Answer %
1 Yes 14%
2 No 86%
Total 100%
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