Freshmen will be required to finish Part II of AlcoholEdu by Friday, yet many Syracuse University students question the value of the program.

AlcoholEdu is a two-part online education program that teaches students the dangers of drinking and ‘how alcohol can impact [one’s] mind, body and college career,’ according to SU’s orientation website.

SU has received numerous awards for its alcohol prevention education from the Department of Education and Outside the Classroom, the creators of AlcoholEdu, according to an April 6, 2006, article published in The Daily Orange. But students said they are finding the AlcoholEdu program useless, unorganized and unpersuasive.

‘The program isn’t effective. It’s stupid,’ said Teresa Sabga, a freshman photography major. ‘It’s really easy for kids to cheat throughout it. What kids really need is experience.’

Sabga, originally from Trinidad — where the drinking laws are less strict — said she is in disbelief about how much people drink in the United States, specifically at SU. She said kids will only learn about drinking and alcohol from getting ‘really drunk’ once and learning how awful it feels. Then it is hoped they’ll realize not to ever do it again, Sabga said.

In August, Outside the Classroom published a government regulated study showing that AlcoholEdu has been ‘proven effective in reducing dangerous alcohol use by college students and reducing alcohol-related harms, such as blackouts, drunk driving and sexual assaults,’ according to its 2010 summary of research.

The study, conducted by Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, randomly assigned 15 colleges, including Villanova University and Cornell University, to have their first-year students use the AlcoholEdu program, according to the summary. Students reported having fewer total drinks and demonstrated more alcohol-related knowledge compared to those who had not been exposed to the program.

Andrew Wall, an assistant professor at the University of Rochester, also created a study testing the effect of AlcoholEdu. He found that college students who completed the program ‘experienced about 50 percent fewer negative health, social and academic consequences than students who had not taken AlcoholEdu,’ according to the study’s summary.

Yet despite this, the number of liquor law violations — 1,084 — given to SU students in the past year has reached a record high, according to a Sept. 12 article published in The Daily Orange.

‘I have seen a lot of people throwing up and being taken away in ambulances on Comstock,’ said Max Doblin, a freshman advertising and entrepreneurship major.

Doblin said AlcoholEdu provides information that students probably don’t know. The program gives students hard facts rather than making assumptions, but it was redundant and time consuming, he said.

But Doblin said he thinks having a lecture during the first week of school for freshmen would be both interactive and fun. This would be a better way for the university to inform students about alcohol prevention, he said.

Nancy Taylor, a freshman television, radio and film major, said she found AlcoholEdu lacked organization and that it presented too many facts at once. Taylor said that it didn’t change her opinion about drinking, which made it even more useless to complete.

‘I failed it three times,’ she said. ‘My mom ended up doing it for me so I could be done with it. It was a total waste of time.’

Taylor said she is unenthusiastic about taking Part II of AlcoholEdu.

Said Taylor: ‘I’ll do it at the last minute because I have to, not because I want to.’

mhnewman@syr.edu

Published on September 21, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Meredith: mhnewman@syr.edu | @MerNewman93