It has come to my attention that students at the School of Medical Sciences (SMS) at Kwame Nkrumah University of
Science and Technology (KNUST) can be threatened with punishment when they miss lectures even though several and quite possibly many classes do not keep appropriate attendance records. It seems the evidence based idea of attendance register keeping can be replaced by: who lecturers’ notice or do not notice at classes even when their memory is required to stretch back days, weeks or even months. It is an SMS Department which has confirmed this in writing; strange methodology particularly when the punishment option is threatened!
I had thought that medicine and those who practiced it followed a science based approach. I also had thought that attendance registers would have been mandatory for all classes at KNUST especially if the punishment option was on the agenda, which it seems it is, otherwise it would not have been put in writing by an SMS Department.
Indeed though in some instances the SMS does use attendance registers or at least I should say I know of one register that is in existence even though it may have a page or so missing. It appears that in that register the SMS Department seems to count two entries by a particular student as only one entry but then again this is the register where a page seems to be missing and perhaps if that page was there it would testify to the fact that the particular student had three attendances out of the possible four. Well, when one looks at the student’s note book it demonstrates that the student did attend the lecture which the seemingly missing page should have recorded. So there you have three attendances out of a possible total of four, and on a fourth attendance the student had an “Excuse Duty” form from a medical doctor and was given a week off sick. So it seems the memory methodology of lecturers’ noticing who was attending or not is not very accurate, and certainly the Department must have gone to lots of trouble to calculate that more than one attendance equals only one; interesting mathematics; strange happenings at KNUST on which the Department threatens possible punishment to a student!
It is good though to note that the general teaching ability, knowledge and care for students by lecturers at the SMS is reported to be of a good standard. Maybe though they should stay well out of record keeping, mathematics and perhaps other forms of management and administration, and stay with their activities firmly planted in medicine otherwise I could be wasting the near seven thousand U.S. Dollars I pay each year for my son’s education at KNUST.
Peter Cunningham
