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Thursday 12 December 2019

About Four Years of OAU Transcripts Service Going Digital with ETX Handling it, and With Bad Reviews Everywhere Online: What Has Gotten Better? (TAGS: WES, ECA, IQAS, NAIRALAND, OAU, ETX, TRANSCRIPTS, GOOGLE)


About Four Years of OAU Transcripts Service Going Digital with ETX Handling it, and With Bad Reviews Everywhere Online: What Has Gotten Better?
Some of us used the OAU’s transcripts service every now and then when it was 100% manual, and we have also been using it every now and then since it turned digital, and if there is anyone who should be able to know what has been up in the processes of getting your transcripts from OAU, it should be people like us. You must have read on every website and app people’s bitter complaints about their bitter experiences with OAU when they requested for their transcripts, and yes, everything you have read is true, absolutely true! Myself, I have written tons of reviews of OAU’s Transcripts service with the startup called ETX handling it, and every one of them were written from my experiences gathered over my several years of working on people’s transcripts. This is another criticism of OAU, ETX and their transcripts service.
First of all, the OAU’s digital transcripts service as handled by ETX is a rip off! The least payment on the website as of today is #10,000 and these are for local destinations (some local destinations have higher charges than #10,000), and for international destinations, it begins from #22,000 and goes as high as #37,000 depending on the country you are sending your transcripts to. Requesting your transcripts for personal view (unofficial use) which would be sent to your email would cost you up to #11,000. All these charges are too much for a transcripts service. We have signed petitions online we are tired, we have complained to federal agencies that could look into this exploitation but all to no avail (check out our petition to the Ministry of Education here https://www.change.org/p/nigeria-ministry-of-education-stop-oau-ile-ife-management-from-forcing-etx-ng-on-her-alumni-for-transcript-processing).
If the charges are so high and the services provided are prompt and worth the charges, maybe people would not be complaining about the charges; satisfaction would cover it all I’m sure. But nope! The moment you pay the money, and ETX confirms you have paid, ETX’s online relationship with you is over! They have broken up with you without you suspecting they have. No feedback from them, you can’t call them, the chats and the emails you receive from them are automated messages having phrases like “your transcript is in process” to make you feel like something is being done on your transcripts, but na lie! Your file is probably on somebody’s table sitting there while the person employed to attend to it engage in some chitchats with their colleagues over some topic that’s not even in relation to what they are employed for. But you will be there thinking your transcript is actually under processing and you will soon hear from where you are sending it to that it has been delivered. Unfortunately, the wait never ends, and such waiting is the reason why so many people lose chances and opportunities per time. It’s depressing!
It’s been about four years since OAU switched from dealing transcripts with her alumni directly to using ETX as the middle digital agent so as to facilitate the request for and the delivery of transcripts, and nothing has changed really; the same problems over and over again. Going digital was supposed to help the requester of their transcripts not need to come down to Ife, but you will still have to come down to Ife lest you have someone on ground doing the processes for you, and the processes are rigorous than what anyone who the transcript doesn’t belong to to be committed to it as it would require of them—unless of course they are paid for such task.
I was initially thinking the solution to these problems is for ETX to employ more people than the lesser than 10 people they are always having on seats for work, and the Exams and Records and the General Office of the Departments should have a lot of NYSC corp members too, to carry on some petty jobs the nonacademic staffs leave unattended to because it would involve that they travel from buildings to buildings in the school. These petty jobs are the reasons why things are generally slow in OAU, and having enough corp members to run the errands would make it easier; this is what I thought. But recently, I learnt the problem is not inadequate hands to do the job, but rather negligence at every office that your transcripts processes will have to involve. This thing is no joke here! The people have to have the fears of losing their jobs if they are found lagging behind on any portion of job assigned to them per time. To sell this fear to them must be an unbiased committee that would check up every body’s job per working week to know what they have achieved and what they are still leaving undone. Then and only then would an alumnus be able to order their transcripts and rest assured someone is working on to make sure it gets to where it’s needed on time.


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