Makerere re-advertises 40 courses over low numbers

Dr Vincent Ssembatya, the quality assurance director at Makerere

KAMPALA- Makerere University has re-advertised about 40 courses two weeks after they released the private admission list.

According to Mr Charles Ssentongo, the assistant academic registrar, few students were admitted to the courses forcing the institution to re-advertise the programmes especially those from the College of Education and External Studies, College of Veterinary Medicine, Animal Resources and Biosecurity, College of Humanities and Social Sciences and those from upcountry campuses in Mbale, Mbarara, Jinja and Arua.

He, however, declined to explain whether the courses had initially attracted fewer applicants or the cutoff points were higher than what the students who gave those individual programmes their first choices scored in their Uganda Advanced Certificate of Education results.

“They (courses) didn’t get enough students,” he said yesterday.
The students have up to July 20 to submit their academic documents for vetting before they can be admitted.

No public sensitisation
Dr Vincent Ssembatya, the quality assurance director, in a separate interview told Daily Monitor that some of the courses attracted few applicants because there was little or no public sensitisation after the review of some of their academic programmes.

He added that some of the programmes were merged to remove duplications to effectively utilise the university’s human resource to deliver quality services but also called upon schools to prioritise career guidance as some of the students fail to get admitted because of wrong choices.
For instance, he said courses such as Diary Industry and Business, Poultry Industry and business, Feed Industry, Leather, Commercial Insects and Wildlife, Ranching and Meat which were independent were merged to create one course they named Bachelor of Industrial Livestock and Business and the students will specialise in their areas of interest when they join second year.

“We need time to tell people before we can get big numbers. Every time you make changes, people need to be sensitised. There was a curriculum review to remove duplications and we are also trying not to split resources into different classes. Some programmes got too many applicants and others got too few. Even us we get surprised, we don’t know how we got to all that. But second application will help,” he said.