VICTORIA University has admitted to paying about $600,000 in compensation to students in two of its programs after the courses failed to meet accreditation standards.
VU’s Bachelor of Health Sciences (traditional Chinese medicine) will not be offered this year after it did not meet the requirements of the Chinese Medicine Registration Board between 2002 and 2005.
And students from its Bachelor of Health Science in naturopathy and homeopathy have been transferred to other schools and the course has been scrapped for the same reason.
VU’s senior deputy vice-chancellor, Prof John McCallum said the university was addressing the problems and would ensure all courses has “appropriate and timely professional accreditation in future”.
The university has since attained accreditation for its Chinese medicine program, but would not run the class in 2007 because of low enrolments.
VU’s student union general secretary, Simon Walliker, said the accreditation problems were an embarrassment for the university and had damaged its reputation.
“How do you compensate people who have given up so much time for courses they wrongly believed were worth something?”
Prof McCallum said requirements for external accreditation for VU courses would now be managed at its faculty, rather than its school level.
