Government petitioned to abolish University Entrance Examinations

Students in Karonga and other stakeholders have appealed with government to get rid of University Entrance Examinations (UEE) as a way of admitting students into public universities saying the criteria used lacks transparency.

In a petition presented to the District Commissioner of Karonga on Monday the students state that a number of anomalies mar entrance examinations such that many deserving students fail to make it to the university.

“We feel entrance examinations are not the fairest way of deciding who deserves a place in the university or not because students do not have the opportunity to see the results of how they fared in the tests rather there are only presented with the outcome of who has made it to university or not,” reads the petition in part.

“For this reason many students who do well in the Malawi School Leaving Certificate (MSCE) fail to make it to the university because of a number of factors which some of them might be very minor to deny somebody the chance to attain tertiary education in the public university,” reads another paragraph.

Speaking in a separate interview Harris Mhango who scored 9 points in the 2012 MSCE but was left behind after sitting for the UEE in the same year said inaccessibility to marked papers of the UEE makes it hard for students like him to understand why they did not make it to university.

“If only I had the chance to see my marked sheets of the entrance examinations I would have been able to understand why I do not deserve to be in the university but as the situation stands my failure remains a very bitter pill for me to swallow,” explained Mhango.

“It is better government deals away with the system and rather faculties in respective universities should be stating minimum points every applicant should have in relevant subjects for them to apply for particular courses so that people can compete at such levels,” he explained.

PHWITIKO

Mhango further stated that the outcome of UEE gets to frustrate many young people who had hope of getting into corridors of the university such that many students like him across the country resort to committing suicide or indulging in many uncalled for behavior.

Responding to a questionnaire Ministry of Education’s spokesperson Rebecca Phwitiko said the onus to scrap off UEE remains with the senate committees of individual universities not government.

“This is not a policy issue prescribed by the Ministry, but rather a decision of university senate of individual institutions after all not all public universities use the UEE in the admission process MZUNI and neither will the new Malawi University of Science and Technology (MUST),” she added.

 “However it has to be noted that when University entrance examinations were introduced, there was the view to safeguard against discrepancies between MSCE results and performance of students once admitted into university, so this was a necessary overhead,” she said.