Transcripts Delay in OAU, Where the Problems Are (TAGS: OAU, ETX, TRANSCRIPTS, ECE, WES, IQAS, NAIRALAND, GOOGLE, VERIFICATION)

Transcripts Delay in OAU, Where the Problems Are
Going online to see how you can get your transcripts from OAU to where you need them, but all you come across to read are bad reviews on how overly expensive and extremely slow or impossible the transcripts services are with OAU and the little company handling their transcripts services—ETX (which you have no other choices but to order your transcripts through), bad reviews posted by alumni who are angry about the services because they have been frustrated, exploited and made to lose one opportunity or two. Yes, those complaints are actually true, many of these people have requested for their transcripts on the website and they didn’t get them delivered at all and they heard nothing from nowhere—not from ETX nor from OAU—on why their transcripts were not delivered. ETX just collected their money and left them to wait forever to hear that their transcripts have been delivered, and have them give up when forever refused to come, and they got tired of hoping their transcripts get delivered when they are still useful.

In the midst of all these delay of your transcripts, you have only one side to be angry at—ETX, and that is understandable, as they are the side you paid to, and the one who was supposed to keep in contact with you every now and then to keep you updated on what’s happening about your transcripts processing, but they don’t do this. The communication is reduced to almost zero just after you have paid for the transcripts request. But truth be told? Other than ETX not communicating with their customers, the blame of whatever is happening to your transcripts to delay the delivery or make the delivery never happen is not the fault of ETX! The Exams and Records, the typing room and your department are the three major reasons why your transcripts may never be delivered or be delivered only when you don’t need them anymore for the purpose which you ordered them.

As much as I know, ETX prints your transcripts application in a matter of two to three days that you submitted your request for your transcripts and your payment is confirmed, they submit this application to the OAU staff in charge of your faculty to fetch for your records to see if your results are there or go fetch for them at your department if they aren’t. But these staffs just sit in their open office and chat over topics that are in no way related to work while there are files on their desks untreated. These files would stay months on their table without getting any attention, and if your file will be getting any attention at, you will be lucky if they find your results on your records with them, because if they don’t, that means they will have to write a letter to your department requesting for your results, and that can only mean your transcripts processing just reached where it can never move forward anymore. You can only wait and get tired of waiting!

If you are lucky that the staff in charge of your faculty does their work and actually submit a letter to your department asking for your result (which is almost impossible), just know that the letter is going to stay months with the person in charge of fetching for results at your department with no attention (if it would ever get any attention at all), and if it does get any attention, you will be lucky if they don’t encounter any problem at all while fetching for your results. Because any problem as small as them not finding the result of a course you took would make them drop your work and not attend to it anymore ever. Say you are lucky and no problem was encountered, your results are collated and authorized by the appropriate people in your department, the next problem is that no one is ready to take the results to Exams and Records where your collated results will be taken to where they will be typed into transcripts, neither would anyone at Exams and Records come down to your department to collect the results. Your collated results just sleep and wake at your department waiting for a miracle that may never happen.

If a miracle happens and someone actually gets your results to Exams and Records, your papers are in another trap that will hold it down for several weeks. The job of Exams and Records at this point is to take the collated results to the typing room so they furnish it into transcripts, but they wouldn’t do this even when it’s as easy as just carrying a file to the next room. And when they eventually do, your file is going to have to sit in the typing room for several weeks again before it finally gets typed. After getting typed, the Exams and Records staff in charge of your faculty only need to carry the file to ETX where your typed transcripts will be cross-checked for errors and authorized for sending if found perfect. But the staff will leave your work at the typing room and not carry it. And this is exactly why your transcripts don’t get delivered at all or get delivered when it’s too late or almost too late. You can see now the problems are not really with ETX we like to blame for them. ETX sends your transcripts almost as soon as it’s ready and taken to them for dispatch. The problems are with Exams and Records, your department, and the typing room.

To not talk about problems and not recommend possible ways of solving these problems to make possible a swift transcript exchange service in OAU, I will have to close with these: yes, the idea of electronic transcript services is a very good one, and ETX is okay for the job, but ETX needs to keep the communication with their clients going till the transcripts are delivered. Clients need to know what stage their works are and what is happening to them. Also, there has to be external auditing bodies to audit per week the number of jobs done by everyone involved in the transcripts processes compared to the number of applications submitted to them, and sanctions for anyone found lagging behind a set percentage of work that must have been done by the end of the week. This way, the nonchalance amongst the staffs of OAU wouldn’t delay people’s dream for too long.