Makerere University students demand release of ‘lost’ results

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | Several Makerere University students have demanded the release of their results two years after they failed to access them.

The students accuse the university administration of negligence and failing to respond to their plight.

Mutesi Hadijja, a first-year student at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences who is left with one week to complete her first year, says that she has not accessed the course work and examinations results for the previous semester.

Simon Kabayo, a third-year student of Journalism and Communication noted that he has not been able to access marks for some course units like Computer Literacy which he sat for in his first year in 2018.

Winfred Nakimboya from the College of Veterinary Medicine, Animal Resources and Biosecurity revealed that she narrowly missed competing for the position after a lecturer advised her to drop her chase for a missing mark, and redo the paper.

Following her persistence, it was, later on, discovered that the student’s scripts had been negligently forgotten at a printer shop in the university.

“I want to help people not miss out on opportunities as scholarships and leadership among others. Why should a lecturer simply tell a student to redo a paper that she sat for yet it costs money ?!”

Meanwhile, there is an entire class of over fifty students pursuing a Bachelor of Information Systems and Technology at the College of Computing and Information Science that had to redo a course work this semester after their lecturer claimed to have misplaced their submissions for the previous semester according to reports from the students in class.

In 2017, Professor Barnabas Nawangwe, the University Vice-Chancellor made attempts to introduce a centralized marking system to solve the issue of missing marks and delayed release of results.

The failed system by way of operation had been determined to enable the release of results after one month of learners sitting for exams.

An examinations coordinator from one of the departments at Makerere who preferred anonymity noted that students cannot find answers to why their marks are missing because of bureaucracy.

During a meeting on Friday between the student guild and university management, the management promised to release results for the academic years 2018-2020 and will be viewed by students on the portal.

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URN