Students of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) have petitioned the Institute’s Governing Council over Management’s decision to prevent some students from taking part in the school’s end of semester exams.
The students were prevented from taking part in the exams due to their inability to pay their fees in full thus preventing them from registering their courses online before March 13, 2019.About 1,300 students are said to have been affected and have not been able to take part in the exams which began last Monday, May 6, 2019.
The Convenor of a group calling itself the Concerned GIMPA Students Association, Abubakari Baba in an interview with Citi News made a passionate appeal to the school’s management to rescind its harsh decision and pardon defaulting students.
“We want to appeal to the governing board of GIMPA to at least assist students who are being denied from writing their exams to be able to do so. As a result of not meeting the deadline for payment of fees to be able to register on the school’s portal to be able to write one’s exams.”
“Some of these reasons of not being able to meet the deadline has to do with various personal challenges in mobilizing funds. Some of these students are on scholarship. Sometimes bursary for scholarship does not come as expected. Even though students have to look for other avenues to be able to meet those deadlines. One painful thing is that the number is so huge.”
The students had threatened to demonstrate against the management of the school should they fail to re-open registration to make them eligible to partake in the examinations.
The SRC President, Joseph Osei Mensah had however indicated that they were not in support of the demonstration as they did their best to assist the students.He indicated that students failed to pay their fees to enable them to register before the extended deadline for registration.
“There is agitation building up on campus due to registration issues. On Monday we started the examination and per the academic board decision, if you fail to meet the deadline, you cannot be part of the examination. There was a deadline for students to meet and as SRC, we mediated and we got an extension for students to do the registration. There was also a subsequent extension. After that deadline some students continued to pay their fees in anticipation of another deadline but management says they want to instill some sanity and for that reason, they will not open the online system,” he explained.
He, however, said the SRC will continue to engage authorities of the school for a possible 24-hour window for affected students to register.
“As much as we sympathize with the students, I am not in support of the demonstration. At this point, what we can only do is to call on the authorities in charge to at least give some allowance, maybe 24 hours, open the site for the students to register, but the demonstration will not come from the SRC,” he said.
A similar challenge arose months ago at the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ) where some students were prevented from taking their end of semester exams because they were unable to register before the deadline.
The development resulted in a peaceful protest that saw management give the affected students a new opportunity to register.
