I made this image made on Canva
I was to sit for my 3rd year second semester examinations around October last year. My preparation was quite late so I had to spend extra time reading instead of revising what I had read but I had not read up to 30% of the whole lecture taught in that semester.
Here in my school, there is a pass every student must have to sit for examinations, it is called exam pass which is very compulsory during examination period. Invigilators in every exam hall would tick or sign on the exam pass for every paper to be written, so, it's a must to have this paper. The exam pass is downloaded on the school portal which usually, a simple thing that should not take up to 5 minutes to download: but from previous years, the school seems not to care about the website or manage it well anymore. It is now a survival of the fittest to download the pass because the school now upload the pass a week before examination, with over 10,000 students it is so stressful to download exam pass.
I tried all my best during my last exam to get the exam pass but I wasn't able to. About 50% of the whole student population couldn't get the exam pass because the school website was lagging so bad. First day of exam, we got delayed for about 20 minutes at the examination hall because we had no exam pass. The invigilators allowed us in to sit for the exam when a large number of people had the same complaint about the exam pass. We only had to show them our school I.D card as proof that we are students.
Second week of examination, the school website (portal) was still not functioning well and it was becoming so annoying to stay on a website for hours without getting anything out of it. Though, this time around more students were able to dowload the exam pass. Yet, there were still about 25% of us that couldn't do anything on the school portal. The invigilators this time did not agree to use our student I.D card as pass, they asked for course form registration ( which contains all the courses being offered in a semester ). We rushed to make a hardcopy and came back to the examination hall to sit for examination. I was already too tired to wait for my friends after the whole stress of begging the invigilators and trekking to where to print and trekking back to the exam hall.
We thoughts this exam pass issue would not become serious since it is the school fault, but it actually became a big problem when it was the thrid week of exam and the school portal has not changed so we went to write exam with the same course form sheet we printed the other time. Lo and behold, it was rejected and we were insulted as being unserious set of students to be the only ones who are yet to print the exam pass. The matter got worse when the time for our exam was remaining an hour, the fear of failing a course stirred up and some student suggested that we meet the Dean of Student Affairs to seek his help in this matter as he is the only one who can fight for our right.
Only if we knew what we would get from him we wouldnit have gone to meet him. He so much insulted us calling is silly, slow and unserious and other names as if students are the ones in charge of the school portal: the exam pass was even uploaded few days to exam. We regretted going to him.
I and my departmental mates walked back to our college to meet the Head of Department to see if he could help up. He is a man of principle so we didn't to him directly . We met with the most friendly lecturer in our department and we told him to help us convince the HOD to write a letter to the invigilators to allow us in. After many talk, we got the later, went to the exam hall and sat for our exams. But we had two more papers left and the silliest thing happened the next day.
The school made announcement that no student will sit for exam without the exam pass. I was so annoyed because they made such a silly announcement and didn't even work on the website. They then gave a solution that every student yet to get the exam pass should pay 200 naira to get it printed inside the school ICT centre. Like what on earth is that? We shoukd pay for exam pass and about 2,000 students will be on a queue to get it. I had no choice but to do it and it was so stressful to stand in queue for about 4 hours.
I really disliked my school at that time, felt like cursing the authorities but guess what, those in authorities doesn't seem to care: they just make commands and expect us to follow.