As the issue of deferring conditional students of KTU continued to persist, a meeting between executives of the Students Representative Council, Reps from the conditional students, Head of Admissions, Mr. MacLean Lovelace-Dodoo and the Vice-Chancellor of KTU, Prof. David Essuman was held on the 13th of February, 2020 in the office of the VC. This crisis comes as an effect of the actions of NAB and NCTE warning technical universities to desist from enrolling conditional students into their institutions.
The representatives of the SRC in this meeting were Safo Kantanka Obed (SRC President), Godwin Elorm Ahiaku (SRC Procurement Officer) and Abdul Aziz Husseini (SRC Chief Imam). Naa Okaile and Benedict Anim Kwaku represented the conditional students.
This meeting began with the President putting forth the case of maintaining the current conditional students in the institution. The current population of the institution who are conditional students are final year students who gained admission into the university in the 2017/2018 Academic Year. He proposed that by keeping the students enrolled in the school, a policy can be put in place that will explicitly require the students to undertake access courses to redeem themselves or allow them to redeem themselves within a period of two years before they can obtain a graduate’s certificate from this institution. With this provision, the students will be allowed to write the examinations for the first and second semesters.
This proposal made by the president is an initiative already practised by the larger number of technical universities in the country. They have the policy in place that allows their final year conditional students the chance to write the exams for both of their final semesters.
A direct response from Prof. Essuman was in the vain of accepting and respecting the final council decision that was taken concerning the conditional students in KTU. He pointed out that an earlier council decision was to outright dismiss the conditional students from the institution. But due to the machinations of the SRC and other stakeholders, the decision was rectified to only allow the students an extension on the grace period to redeem their grades.
He also alluded to the fact that there was a provision given to the students who had a combination of A1 – C6 grades in the three of their Elective Courses and A1 – D7 in three of their Core Subjects to be able to rescind the status of being conditional students and to become full students. Students who possessed E8 grades were still going to be considered as conditional.
His rebuttal also explained that the access course program was designed to be undertaken by students who graduate from second cycle technical and vocational institutions. Students from high schools are not meant to participate in access courses.
The final statement by the vice-chancellor in favour of the affected students was for them to register in private institutions and high schools in order to be able to sit for the May/June WASSCE. For these students, KTU will be willing to help negotiate for lesser fees with the private institutions.
