The week ending 31st May will see a number of finalist students at Makerere University sitting their final paper at Campus. For many of them, the end of the week will mark the beginning of another stressful period as they wait with baited breath for the release of their end of semester results to know whether they’ll indeed be graduating or they’ll have to put the celebrations on ice. A friend of mine when rhetorically asked if this is her final year, simply replied with a “probably”.
Without a doubt, some finalist students have had a joy ride in the end of semester/course exams, and yet for others, it has been the most torrid examination period since they joined campus. A time so torrid that instead of wondering if they have any retake, they are wondering how many papers they will have to re-do come next year while the colleagues with whom they should have graduated are busy earning a living, serving their nation and generally moving on to the next phase of their life.
You see, getting a retake in any other year may be manageable because one can always do it at the same time while doing other papers the following year, but if it is the final year, woe onto the victim. The cost of having to remain on Campus for an extra year is not the UGX 20K that one would have to spend on the paper being retaken. It’s beyond that. Way beyond.
An affected finalist student may have to fork out well over UGX 1.3M in tuition alone per extra semester, depending on the course. This is exclusive of the UGX 700k for accomodation in a good hostel that such a student would have to incur; over UGX 500k to be spent on food; money to be spent as functional fees; clothing allowances; medical allowances; money spent on buying classwork handouts; stationery; etc. Totalled up, these figures alone may come to over UGX 3M per semester.
The true cost of staying at campus for an extra year may in actual sense be impossible to quantify. For example, think of the psychological pain that the affected student may have to bear, looking at his colleagues progressing with their life, some getting jobs, others getting married and yet others moving out of their parents’ home while he/she watches hers being put on hold for another uncertain year.
Think of the huge feeling of disillusionment that the affected student would have to stomach, having watched all his efforts in his supposed-to-be-final-year’s exams last year being laid to waste because of a single retake that he may even have incurred after missing the pass mark by just 1%. Yes, it happens.
Think of the disappointment that such a student’s sickly parent or guardian would have to withstand, having watched the child on whom they spent the last coin of their savings to ensure that he/she gets a decent education fail at the finish line. Think of the potential heart-attack that such a parent may suffer when he realises that contrary to what he thought, he has to toil even harder under the scorching sun, aiming at out-selling his fellow vendors in a roadside market for an extra income to meet the academic needs of a child he thought would start looking after him last year.
Think of a State-sponsored student from a district 500km away from Kampala who, had it not been for State sponsorship, would be having nothing but a f6 pass-slip to show because he can not afford the prohibitive tuition at campus. Her Government sponsorship has expired at the end of her course; she got a retake in the final year; she can not afford an extra year at campus and so that’s the end of the road for her. She’s back where she was 3yrs ago…with nothing but a F6 pass-slip. Time and tax-payers’ resources wasted.
There is an urgent need for Makerere University to introduce supplementary exams for its finalist students to so as to give a student who may fail his end-of-course exams a chance to sit another test as soon as possible to enable him graduate on time.
Makerere should borrow a leaf from other institutions such as IUIU, KIU and LDC which give their students just a few days/weeks later a second chance to re-sit a paper.
Makerere University is widely seen as the best University in East Africa and I believe that to remain the best, it has to offer the best deal to its students, who are its main stakeholders. One way through which such a deal can be made is by introducing supplementary exams so as to save finalists the psychological and financial cost of having to remain at campus for an extra year.
Supplementary exams will help the university check on the problem of congestion during lecture hours since as it is now, a person who has a retake in a given course unit is advised to attend all lectures for that course unit with students who were a year below him. Introducing supplementary exams will prove that the university puts the immediate interests of the student before its own.
