Makerere University through its academic registrar Alfred Masikye Namoah, has announced that the University will introduce pre entry exams for medicine and surgery courses. It is pushing to cease basing on UACE Results to admit students for medicine and surgery courses. The state owned University has learnt that A’level results do not prepare students well enough for this course and has resulted to a lot of failures in this specific course this is after the Ministry of health decision to set pre entry exams for medical interns. The university also applied the same changes to students pursuing bachelors of laws because of also the high failure of the course.
In a move to minimize failures in 2014 Makerere introduced mandatory entry exams for students interested in pursuing bachelor of laws. Students pay a non refundable fee of 80,000 to seat for these entry exams which has been running for three years now since 2014.
In addition to this fee, candidates are required to have a minimum of 15 points to apply for this course. Females are added 1.5 points to their A’ level results according to Masikye.
On average, Makerere University has been receiving more than 2,000 applicants for the pre-entry exams and yet the university can only admit 300 students per year.
Recently, medical interns from Uganda’s five public universities overwhelmingly protested a decision by the Ministry of Health to set pre-entry exams that will be taken by all medical graduates for them to be enrolled as interns. They also protested failure to be facilitated by the government, as well as poor working conditions. In the process, they elicited support as well as opposition in nearly equal measure.
Dr Simon Peter Kawoya of Naguru Hospital was spot on when he said: “The ministry delayed to introduce this pre-entry internship programme. Many times students cheat in exams so that they are admitted to study medicine yet the results are not theirs. The pre-entry exam will help sieve out those to keep only the cream because this is a course that is aimed at handling people’s lives.”
