By Clare Muhindo
A group of anonymous students from the College of Education and External Studies (CEES) of Makerere University, have threatened the life of one of their lecturers, over claims that he awarded them retakes in their final year exams.
A letter dated 19th October, 2014 was dropped in Michael Walimbwa’s office, at the Makerere University, CEES.
Titled as, “serious warning!” the letter commanded Walimbwa and his colleagues to change all the marks for students with 45%-49% into 50%, the general Makerere University pass mark.
“You are requested to do that from today up to Thursday, 30th October, 2014. Failure to do so, just wait for what happens to your family,” the letter commanded.
In an email interview with Walimbwa, who is currently pursuing his PhD, at the University of Cape Town, in South Africa, he said he travelled on 19th, and the letter was found by his office-mate, Alfred Buluma, who went to the office on Monday, 20th October.
“Letter was dropped under our door in a lousy kaki envelop. Buluma read it and emailed me the details of the letter,” Walimbwa said.
Walimbwa taught Supervision and Guidance to School Practice, CUS3201, to a class of 683 third year students of Bachelor of Arts/ Science with Education, last academic year.
According to Walimbwa, students were required to write essays for their course works. However, he discovered that majority of them had replicated their essays.
“This was very strange, because even when they discuss, the language and style of writing cannot be the same, with the same mistakes, same page numbers, among others. I separated some of those course works and invited them to my office for a redo,” Walimbwa said.
Walimbwa says that students who were not comfortable with his system reported him to the Head of department, who told them to redo the course work.
He had observed that because of the large student numbers, some students hired people to write their course works and they passed with high marks.
“These students usually fail to defend their course work marks, in their end of semester exams. After marking the examinations 55 students out of the 683 had failed,” he said.
Walimbwa says that as a lecturer, he is allowed to adjust the course work mark, but cannot do much, in a situation where a student has failed completely.
He is however scared for his family, since he is not in the country to protect them from any harm.
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