Implication of the Canceled 2020/2021 Session on OAU JAMBites (TAGS: NAIRALAND, OAU, POST-UTME, UTME, CUTOFF, POSTJAMB, GOOGLE, ADMISSION)

Implication of the Canceled 2020/2021 Session on OAU JAMBites

Since the higher institutions started releasing information on their cancellation of a session and when OAU eventually joined the league of schools canceling the 2020/2021 academic session, different news and assumptions have been flying around everywhere on the internet about that; which are mostly true. But sometimes, what is true still needs to be explained better or emphasized more to have greater effects, and the explanation is what I'm about to do. Please pay the best attention to this if you are a JAMBite or a ward of one.

It should be clear to everyone that because schools are canceling the 2020/2021 session doesn’t mean the schools would not continue on processing the admissions of the admission seekers who wrote the 2020/2021 session UTME in 2020 or have already even done their Post-UTME screening or applied for it; these people’s admission processes would continue, only that—if admitted—they would not be resuming school in their own session, which was supposed to be the 2020/2021, as the session as been canceled due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the several months of ASUU strike.

Also, that doesn’t mean the people who would be writing the 2021/2022 UTME this year 2021 would not be admitted by these schools that have canceled the 2020/2021 session and would still be admitting the candidates who wrote their UTME in 2020, it only means that most of these schools—if not all—would merge the two groups of JAMBites together in one session which would be the 2021/2022 session. This means the people who wrote their UTME in 2020 and the people who will write theirs in 2021 would be admitted together in one session, which would be the 2021/2022 session, since the 2020/2021 session has been canceled. So knowing this, what’s going to be the implication of this on the JAMBites seeking admission to the schools that would be merging two sessions of JAMBites together?

Right now, you should be thinking of more candidates to admit from, while the schools would still not want to go too higher than their admission quota. For instance, in the last ten years, OAU has admitted students per session based on these figures: 5,500, 6,000, 7,500, and when they went on to admit around 11,000 some 3 or 4 years ago from around 150,000 applicants who wrote and passed the Post-UTME, they were sanctioned by NUC for that. So let’s say OAU wants to admit a lot of candidates from the JAMBites of 2020/2021 and the JAMBites of 2021/2022 that would now be merged together for one admission session, that would be at least 250,000 applicants. How many of these people would OAU be able to offer admission to? 15,000? 20,000? Whatever figure you’re assuming, just know that would mean tougher screening processes, higher cutoff marks, connections, and all that I can't talk about on the internet; that admission is going to be for the strong only, so I wish you the best of luck as you try to get your own rare spot.

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OAU’s Transcripts Problems: What the Alumni Body Should Do (TAGS: NAIRALAND, GOOGLE, OAU, TRANSCRIPTS, ETX, IFE, WES, IQAS, ICES)

 OAU’s Transcripts Problems: What the Alumni Body Should Do

One of the biggest problems alumni of any school in Nigeria currently face is trying to get their transcripts from their school they graduated from. If you are a graduate and you have not had to lose an advance admission, an opportunity to travel abroad or a delayed promotion at work because your employer is waiting for you to provide your transcripts, it most probably means you’ve not started using your education at the places where you should be using it. Because if you have, you would have been asked to provide your transcripts at some point, and your school would have shown you how problematic they are when it comes to issuing transcripts to people. And with all these I have said about the problems you would encounter to get your transcripts, I have not even slimmed it down to the levels of OAU, and trust me on this, when it comes to OAU, every normal problem becomes even stronger. Since OAU handed the transcripts processes to the private digital company called ETX, instead of the processes getting better and easier, it gets even worse day after day. Go on any social media platform and read about how OAU alumni lament about their sufferings on getting their transcripts, you wouldn’t believe OAU—one of the earliest universities in Nigeria, with the title “leading in ICT” attached to her name—would still be having such problems in this century where everything is swift, easier, and you don’t have to be present to make all these happen.

The transcripts problems in OAU are undeniable, they are there, and it never looks like they would go at one point soon, and I think the reason for this is because the alumni body is either not really in existence, or it exists but it’s corrupt, or—the most likely one—it’s not functional for the unpopular and not-so-rich members of the body—which are the majority of the members of the body. This leads me to believing the OAU alumni body, even though they are not the cause of the transcripts problems in OAU, let it keep happening. I don’t know the law like that, but the much I know about associational rights, I believe the alumni body can sue OAU for a lot of things happening about getting a transcript from OAU, which ranges from monetary exploitation and the bad services to not delivering the transcripts when it’s needed or not delivering it at all. Maybe the alumni body doesn’t know they have the right to sue the school for all these or they just don’t want to, because the powerful members of the body are always friends of the management, It just has to be something like that.

Even though the alumni body does not want to sue OAU for all the corruption happening about getting your transcripts from OAU, they should at least be able to ask that graduates should be given an unofficial copy of their transcripts at their convocation, it’s what any school in the world does; you collect a roll at your convocation and in that roll there is your transcript. If OAU could do this at convocations, it would solve at least 80% of the problems the alumni would have to face when they eventually need their transcripts—official or unofficial. You wouldn’t even have to need an unofficial copy again as the one you would have collected at your convocation would suffice for anything you want to use an unofficial transcript for. Plus, the fact that you have your unofficial transcripts as early as you graduated would curb the problems of the loss of results people have to face when the school’s results database crashes again—which is always crashing, and the department can't find the results in papers anymore. This always means that any alumnus in such situation is never getting a transcript from the school no matter how hard they try. Whereas this problem can be solved by giving the graduates a copy of their transcripts at convocation, so that in the case of loss of results, the person can always provide the unofficial transcripts they have with them for the school to verify and be able to have their results on the database again. But it is what it is, the OAU alumni body doesn’t even act like they are concerned about the bad record of the school on issuing transcripts to their graduates, and this is really shameful.

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When is OAU Resuming?

When is OAU Resuming?

It’s almost one year now since OAU has been closed against all academic activities, primarily because of the COVID-19 pandemic and secondarily because of the 9 months ASUU strike that eventually got suspended last December. Amidst all that is a lot of other internal instabilities with NASU and SANNU striking back to back; the former stopped every other activities that aren’t academics from happening. Good to know all the unions have suspended their strikes now, and they are ready for work as soon as the Christmas and New Year holidays are over, which is two weeks counting from December 24^th, 2020 and would be ending on 7^th of January, 2021. So the new year’s staffs fellowship would be on Friday, 8^th of January, 2021, and work would begin properly the following Monday. That is that about nonacademic activities, but when can we be expecting OAU to declare a resumption date for academic activities? This is the question everyone is asking now, and this is not a question to have an answer to without considering a lot of factors that have the greatest power in defining when OAU would be ready for academic activities.

ASUU strike suspended, yes, and the lecturers are ready to work, but as things are looking in the management of OAU and the university environment as at today, it does not look like OAU will resume academic activities in the next two or three weeks. So they should chill everyone thinking since all strikes have been suspended and the people don’t really care about the pandemic anymore, OAU should be able to resume lectures in the first or second week of January of the new year; things are currently not looking in favour of that thought. Apart from the fact that the governments at the center and at the regions are yet to really understand how they want to manage academic activities with COVID-19 still very much in town and the vaccines not available to the country yet, and they don’t want to declare academic activities opened yet, the management of OAU on their own are yet to figure out how to keep the academic activities going even in the midst of all these. OAU has always been a digitally backwards university (forget that “Leading in ICT” thing OAU says about herself, it’s a big lie), so for this, the digitally-enhanced academic activities can't happen in OAU anytime soon to make resumption of academic activities happen this early January; not even when the lecturers have been on strike for long and no preparation has been made priory for the introduction of digitally-enhanced academic activities.

Another thing that OAU would need before calling the students back to school is the fumigation and the rearrangement of the halls of residence, even if they would not really mean to work by the precautions against COVID-19, they would at least want to pretend like they do; they would want to change a lot of things about how the students staying in the hostels live together. Also, they would want to do a lot of things about the lecture theaters that would depict that they are adhering to the precautions against COVID-19. None of these have been done yet, in fact nothing visible has been done about any of these. It is also good to think it is possible for the departments to not want to encourage hundreds of people having to receive lectures together in a small theater, so most of the popular courses might need to have a review of how many lecturers would take them and how many people can be in each class. All these would take the departments several departmental meetings to prepare. So with all these, returning students should just stop looking forward to resuming academic activities this early January, because the nearest that can happen is going to be late January. However, the post-UTME candidates should be prepared to be called upon for their screening very soon. Also, on this, anything can still happen, the school might still say no need to write an exam for the screening, they would just go ahead and screen applicants using just their O/Level results and the UTME results; it has happened before, and it can happen again. But whatever the case may be for the returning students and the JAMBites, let’s all just keep believing things would get better with OAU this year, as everyone is already having the urge to get back to work.

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