WITH the recent suspension of the University of Guyana Students Society (UGSS) President, Ganesh Mahipaul, the affairs are currently being run by the members of the Executive Council who are working in the various faculties to get students settled into the new 2013/2014 academic year which commenced on Monday.

This is according to the Secretary of the UGSS, Adel Lilly who explained to the Guyana Chronicle in a telephone interview, yesterday, that while the council usually has 22 members, 21 were elected during the last elections, and since Mahipaul’s suspension and the resignation of two other members, there are now 18 members remaining.
Lilly said that the members of the council have regular faculty board meetings, and the decision regarding when UGSS elections will be held for this academic year is left up to the Students’ Welfare Division of the university.
He indicated that according to the constitution, elections are supposed to be held in the fourth or fifth week of the new academic year and from what he has gathered, elections should be held sometime at the end of September.

STAFF ASSESSMENT
Meanwhile, UG students were being denied online access to their grades for the second semester of the Academic Year 2012/2013, pending their completion of a staff assessment for the courses of that semester.
When students logged into their accounts on the university’s website to view their academic profile, they were met with the following: “NOTE: 2012/2013 semester 2 grades will be visible after you complete the staff assessment for that course using eSA2”.

Students took to social networking sites such as Facebook to express their disapproval of this, with one student stating “This cannot be right. When we took a loan for tuition last semester or paid cash nowhere did we sign to ‘grades pending staff assessment’.”
Another student said: “Glad to know I’m not the only person feeling this way. I don’t think grades and staff assessment should have anything to do with each other, this is wrong, its wrong and should not be condoned.”
Lilly told this publication that the UGSS recently met with Vice Chancellor Professor Jacob Opadeyi and while he did not change his position on the staff assessment, they did come to an agreement.
According to him, beginning this academic year, students will no longer have to do the staff assessment online, but this will be done in hard copy in the eleventh week of every academic year.