Creating Bill of Students Rights and Responsibilities at Helwan University

Abstract

University is open to all persons who are qualified according to its admission standards unless resource limitations results in the closure of academic programs in which applicants have expressed interest. Students' rights refers to a set of rights, responsibilities, and duties under which a student can seek and receive all educational service, encompass legal and ethical issues in the academic institutions and student relationship, including a student's right to privacy and to equal evaluation. So this study aimed to creating bill of students' rights and responsibilities at Helwan University. Operational design was carried out in the twenty faculties at Helwan University; Quota sampling used a sampling method for gathering representative data from two categories first category was university students consisted of 1200 students enrolled in four levels at academic year 2013 / 2014 representative 60 students from every faculty from twenty faculties studied setting at Helwan University. Second category was academic staff consisted of 40 academic staff 20 were professors and 20 were assistant professors 2 from every faculty study setting at Helwan University. Self-administered questionnaire used for the data collection consisted of two parts; the first part is socio-demographic characteristics served to collect information about age, gender, levels and educational qualification. The second part was 98 items divided into four components about academic, non-academic rights and responsibilities. The researchers developed a bill of students' rights and responsibilities based on students' opinions, and second part is an opinionnaire sheet used for the validity of the created students' bill of rights and responsibilities. The response was 3-point Likert scale from "strongly agree" to" disagree." The results are evident that; Mean Score in total agreements upon students' rights were ''1.57 ± 0.37''. While, Mean Score in total agreement upon students' responsibilities were ''1.53 ± 0.41''. There is a highly statistically significant positive correlation between students' scores of agreement upon rights and responsibilities (p<0.01). In conclusion, there is a highly statistical significant positive correlation between students' score of agreement upon rights and responsibilities. There was negative statistically significant correlations were revealed between students' scores of academic responsibilities and non- academic responsibilities with levels. It is concluded that the proposed students' bill of rights was valid, and effective in almost all items related to academic and non-academic students' rights and responsibilities were highest score; this reflects the importance of increasing students' awareness of their rights as well as their responsibilities and involves the students' rights to be informed about all aspects of the learning process and their involvement in the quality of education. The study recommends disseminating this created bill of rights and responsibilities in all universities at the Ministry of Higher Education in Egypt.

Keywords: bill of rights, quota sampling, responsibilities, rights, and students bill of rights.