THE TUFTS DAILY
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TUFTSDAILY.COM
Friday, April 12, 2013
VOLUME LXV, NUMBER 51
Where You Read It First Est. 1980
Med school adds public health doctorate degree by
Audrey Michael
Daily Editorial Board
The Tufts University School of Medicine will now offer a Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) degree program, to enroll its first class in the fall of 2013. Associate Program Director of DrPH Janet Forrester explained that demand from students in the Masters in Public Health program was a major factor in the degree’s creation. “Many of [the students] expressed an interest in staying at Tufts after they completed their Masters in Public Health,” Forrester, who is also an associate professor in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine, said. The program was designed to respond to an increased demand for public health professionals, according to Aviva Must, dean of Public Health and Professional Degree Programs and a professor in and chair of the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine. “There is a projected workforce need for well-trained doctoral level public health professionals,” Must told the Daily in an email. The School of Medicine also felt the medical community would benefit from a doctoral program in public health through Tufts. “We thought that Tufts had unique strengths that we could bring to address this need,” Forrester said. The School of Medicine had wanted to create a doctorate pro-
gram in this area for some time, Forrester said. A committee comprised of public health faculty created a strategic plan and decided a doctoral program would be the goal, she said. “A committee of interested faculty worked for over a year to research existing programs, define our particular emphases, establish the curriculum and develop a comprehensive proposal,” Must said. Public health faculty at the School of Medicine also wanted to train students at the doctoral level. “Our faculty [was] eager to train a select group of students at the doctoral level to provide leadership in public health,” Must said. Forrester added that for faculty, training doctoral students is a different and rewarding experience. “It adds richness to your life to train students who are one step away from being your colleagues,” she said. The program’s faculty will come from the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine, faculty in related fields from around the university and adjunct faculty in and outside of Boston, according to Must. Forrester believes that Tufts’ dedication to faculty collaboration in teaching and research will add a unique interdisciplinary dimension to the program. “This is an excellent environment for the training of doctoral students with an interdisciplinary focus,” she said. see HEALTH, page 2
Courtesy Peter Farlow via wikimedia commons
The 96 runners on the Tufts Marathon Team are preparing for the Boston Marathon on Monday.
Tufts Marathon Team prepares for upcoming race by James
Pouliot
Daily Editorial Board/
As Marathon Mondayapproaches, Tufts’ Boston Marathon team is winding down its 2012-2013 training season in preparation for the race. The group of 96 official runners completed its final training run on Wednesday and awaits a celebratory dinner Sunday night after the race. President’s Marathon Challenge director and TMT Coach Don Megerle, a 42-year Tufts veteran who coached swimming for 33 years before the establishment of the marathon team, expressed great optimism about the coming
marathon. This will be the team’s tenth marathon since President Emeritus Lawrence Bacow established the President’s Marathon Challenge in 2003. “I think we’re very well prepared, probably as informed as any group that we have had — and very spirited,” Megerle said. “It’s become a real, cohesive and enjoyable group to be with. They’ve done very well.” The team is coming to the end of its second year of reduced numbers, Mergele said. The 10-year contract with team owner John Hancock Financial Services was renegotiated to extend the two remaining years of 200 runners to
four years of 100 Tufts runners. The contract will expire after the 2015 Boston Marathon, according to Megerle. It is not clear how the Tufts Marathon Team will continue to operate. “We don’t know what will happen,” Megerle said. “We may not get any [running] numbers. It’s up to the CEO at John Hancock. Do they understand the importance of the Boston Marathon for Boston? Very much so. I can’t even venture to guess what they might do.” Aside from being an athletic group, TMT is an imporsee MARATHON, page 2
High-stakes standardized testing comes under harsher scrutiny by Jacqueline
Quander
Contributing Writer
Most college students have had their brush with the familiar and dreaded SATs. While national standardized tests such as the SATs and ACTs remain standard fare in college admissions, university administrators and professors have begun to raise questions are beginning to arise concerning their effectiveness. In February, a coalition of over 130 Massachusetts professors from around 20 schools, including Tufts, Harvard and Brandeis, signed onto a public statement condemning the use of high-stakes standardized testing in high schools as a means of evaluating schools, teachers and individual students. According to a Feb. 22 Washington Post article, the statement pushes education officials to shift assessment policies away from standardized testing. Part of the statement reads: “Given that standardized tests provide only one indicator of stu-
dent achievement, and that their high-stakes uses produce everincreasing incentives to teach to the test, narrow the curriculum or even to cheat, we call on the BESE [Board of Elementary and Secondary Education] to stop using standardized tests in highstakes decisions affecting students, teachers, and schools.” The statement also emphasizes that standardized testing perpetuates pre-existing education inequalities, saying: “Numerous studies document that the use of high-stakes testing — including test barriers to high school graduation — bears adverse impact on students and is accompanied by widening racial/ethnic and income-based gaps.” The movement against standardized testing is growing. Professors in Georgia and the Chicago area have issued letters opposing the use of standardized testing in evaluating teachers, and over a third of principals in New York State have issued a similar petition. When it comes to college admissions, Tufts continues to rely on standardized testing
in an increasingly selective and competitive process. Tufts’ acceptance rates have hovered around 20 percent in recent years, this year dipping to 18.7 percent. Simultaneously, numbers of applications increased this year by 11 percent, in what Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Lee Coffin called a “historical application cycle” according to a Jan. 22 Daily article. According to Associate Professor of Political Science Deborah Schildkraut, the use of these scores is not a perfect way to test the academic capacity of prospective students. “Getting into college is so competitive these days and they just get so many applications and from kids whose scores are fantastic. I’m sure the 80% of students not getting in have scores that are very comparable to the 20% who got in,” she said. “I would think that scores are useful for weeding out people who are clearly not academically qualified.” This year’s testing scores
Inside this issue
MCT
Tufts will continue to rely on standardized testing in an increasingly selective admissions process. proved impressively high, emphasizing Tufts’ already competitive reputation. For the class of 2017, mean SAT scores were 728 for critical reading, 735 for math and 733 on writing, up a few points from last year, according to an April 2. Daily article. The mean ACT score of 32 was the same as last year. Despite the high achieve-
ments of Tufts admitted students in the realm of standardized testing, these capabilities are not everything when it comes to contributing to campus, says Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education Dean Herbert. “It may be something of an indicator of how they do in see TEST page 2
Today’s sections
Back Bay’s Mistral is an upscale departure from the normal.
The women’s lacross team will host a showdown with No. 10 Amherst this weekend.
see ARTS, page 3
see SPORTS, back
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