There are no 'on the spot' admissions here - UB

EPHRAIM KEORENG
Staff Writer | Wednesday March 10, 2010 00:00

At a press conference to explain the chaos caused by the new admission system, the director of public affairs, Mhitshane Reetsang said reports that they have been admitting students 'on the doorstep' were untrue.

She said what they have been doing since Monday is 'taking application forms of students and giving them letters of acknowledgement'.

'The acknowledgement letter means that your application has been received. It does not mean that you have been admitted. We cannot process an application and admit students on the spot. That is impossible. It would take maybe a day to process one student's application and admit them, so you can imagine how long it would take to process all the applications,' she said.

UB discontinued its system of admitting students on a first-come, first-served basis after it caused a stampede at the institution in the past two days, Reetsang explained. It will now go back to its old system of processing applications based on merit.  She said they have since realised that the system is not working and was causing students a lot of frustration as they were queuing up for long periods of time. Others spend the whole night at the institution so that they may beat the queue UB. 'We came to realise that the first-come, first-served basis may have been misinterpreted by students by thinking that they will be admitted into any programme of their choice ignoring academic merit,' Reetsang continued. 'This may have worsened by stating that the minimum cut-off point is 36 points.'

The UB spokesperson said students might have misconstrued the new system to mean that the minimum 36 points required for entry into the institution mean that programme requirements would be disregarded.