Post-UTME candidates battle UNILAG over withheld results

Scores of candidates who sat for the post-Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination of the University of Lagos have cried foul over the alleged refusal of the university to release their results after experiencing an outage while writing the examination.

The candidates, who sat for the computer-based test last month, claimed that officials did not rectify the outage which occurred minutes into the examination, a situation which led to their results being withheld.

About 32,000 candidates sat for the examination which held in August at various centres within the institution. The university’s management had since announced that 17,935 candidates passed the examination with a minimum score of 40 per cent.

One of the candidates, Adeola Adebisi, however, said she was not able to log in again after the outage, despite assurances from the invigilators.

She called on authorities at the university to release her results without further delay.

“My schedule time was 7:30 am but I started my examination around 11:30 am due to delay connected with the sitting arrangements and screening. The examination was computer-based and the duration was 30 minutes. But 27 minutes after the commencement of my exam, the system took away the question and displayed Connection Failed, which actually happened to almost every candidate in the hall at that particular time. So, we had to notify the invigilators and they asked us to log in again. This was not successful. We told them we could not log in again and they collected our examination schedule and told us they would have to reload our questions,” she said.

Another candidate, Oluwasola Ogunbuyide, who claimed she was allowed to rewrite the examination the day after the outage disrupted the examination, said she was disturbed that the university had yet to release her result.

“My registration number is 56185060HB and I did not engage in any malpractice. I was scheduled to sit for the test on August 12, 2015. But the arrangement was truncated when I was writing the exam. The officers in charge rescheduled my test for the following day. But my result has been withheld. I am appealing to UNILAG to please release my result,” she said.

But, while admitting that there was outage in all the examination centres, the Head, Information Unit of the university, Mr. Olagoke Oke, said power was restored and candidates were given extra time to finish the examination.

Oke, who also admitted that some results were withheld by the authorities, maintained that the withheld results had nothing to do with the outage.

“It (outage) was a general complaint. Power was restored and they were given extra time. About 32,000 candidates sat for the examination. Some candidates had problems because they were not familiar with online tests. Some were challenged because there was no paper test. All the results were released except for the results of less than 200 candidates,” he said.