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Makerere withholds 14,000 transcripts over fake marks

Friday March 24 2017
MakererePix

Uganda's Makerere University Chancellor Ezra Suruma (right) hands over a certificate to Mr Rodgers Mukalele, the most outstanding student in sciences during the 67th graduation ceremony in February 2017. The university is withholding 14,895 transcripts over fake marks. FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

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.

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“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 During the verification, names of 58 students with altered marks were withdrawn.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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