By DAMALI MUKHAYE and PATIENCE AHIMBISIBWE
In Summary
- Academic Registrar, Alfred Masikye Namoah, on March 20 wrote to the university staff, students and stakeholders indicating they had temporarily shut down the transcripts processing in order to clean up the mess.
- Vice-Chancellor, Prof John Ssentamu Ddumba said the university had engaged its Senate IT team to clean up the system.
Uganda's pioneer Makerere University has withheld 14,895
transcripts for students who graduated in February until the institution
completes cleaning up its results management system after some staff
infiltrated the system and falsified some marks.
The university Vice-Chancellor, Prof John Ssentamu Ddumba,
Thursday asked the former students and the public to give them three to
four weeks to investigate the matter and remove those who were illegally
listed in the 67th graduation booklet.
“There is nothing the university can do. But students can give
us three to four weeks to sort out the problem and we will start issuing
transcripts again. We hadn’t started giving them out yet and I can’t
give them when we know there is a problem,” Prof Ddumba told Daily Monitor.
The university took the decision on March 9 after suspending
four members of the Academic Registrar’s department on suspicion that
they participated in altering students’ marks without permission from
their bosses.
The suspects have since been arrested, with only one of them later released.
It is against this backdrop that the Academic Registrar, Mr
Alfred Masikye Namoah, on March 20 wrote to the university staff,
students and stakeholders indicating they had temporarily shut down the
transcripts processing in order to clean up the mess.
“The Academic Registrar with the college registrars recalled and
scrutinised the names of students on the 67th graduation list. During
the verification, names of 58 students with altered marks were
withdrawn. The university management discovered that there was
alteration of marks,” Mr Namoah wrote almost a month after the February
graduation ceremony.
It is is not the first time that Makerere is withholding
students’ transcripts after graduation. In 2015, a total of 13,776
students were affected as they waited for the university officials to
verify their results.
Prof Barnabas Nawangwe, the deputy Vice-Chancellor in charge of
Finance, said they regretted the inconvenience they had caused their
clients, but appealed that the university be given an opportunity to
clean up its system.
Prof Ddumba said the university had engaged its Senate IT team to clean up the system.
In 2008, the Senate at its 133rd meeting, noted with concern
that the data they were storing on the Academic Records Information
System (ARIS) was not secure and was not functioning as well as
expected. It was also noted that some academic units had declined to use
it and instead developed their own.
A committee was subsequently set up comprising Prof Sandy
Stevens Tickodri-Togboa, the former vice-chancellor in charge of Finance
and former State minister for Higher Education, Dr Idris A Rai, Dr N
Mulira and Dr L.K Atuhaire.
The team later recommended that the systems developed to handle
examination results be equipped with alerts so that they could instantly
notify the control centre of changes being made to marks indicating the
location and user
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