As a concerned parent I would like to air my opinion on behalf of the final-year students of a certain university in Windhoek and their suffering parents.
I really don’t know what is going on there, except that there is something very wrong at this university.
As a parent I cannot understand how this “institution of excellence” can be like this.
Our poor children are not being treated with any respect.
Take, for example, the law faculty and the subject of jurisprudence, a year module.
The children (full-time and also part-time) had a lecturer in the beginning of this year.
The current jurisprudence lecturer, however, who has taught the children only for a very short time, is failing students left right and centre.
Why so much stress?
Students had a very short time in which to catch up a whole year’s work, but we, the parents, pay tuition fees for the whole year.
This means this institution is collecting more than half a million Namibia dollar.
Regarding the new lecturer’s assignments and tests: The man is known as a ‘rude marker’, who takes a whole semester to mark these.
If most of the class fails, then you may be lacking lecturing and marking skills.
But no, this university allows lecturers with very high failure rates to continue on their lecturing journeys.
Other universities in the world require a 60% to 70% pass rate, or the lecturer is out.
Our children are suffering under this institution’s regime.
They are suffering emotionally and it causes them to drink, causing us as parents even more stress.
Why are there such low standards for lecturers in Namibia, is this a joke?
This so-called institution of excellence should be ashamed.
Regarding final-year research projects and dissertations: When the deadline came most of them have not received feedback from their supervisors, as the majority of the supervisors have not supervised the whole year.
Students then panicked and asked their supervisors whether they could submit, but their supervisors told them they could not because they have not seen their dissertations.
This means many students could not hand in any dissertation at all.
As a result of this, they fail the subject and the year by default.
We as parents should claim our money back from this institution, because it did not deliver the services we have paid for.
This is only fair to those who are paying the fees and to our children, who are working very hard through many nights to pass their exams.
They need to be afforded some simple human rights here.
We need proper solutions now, no more nonsense, please.
Concerned Parent
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