By Kelvin Obambon
The management of the University of Cross River (UNICROSS) has broken its silence regarding the challenges and delays surrounding the institution’s student result portal, citing a complex data migration process and a systemic “fight back” from those profiting from old irregularities.
Speaking during a press conference at the Ernest Etim Bassey Press Centre in Calabar on Tuesday, the Director of Exams and Results, Dr. Anderson Etika, provided a detailed breakdown of the transition from the university’s old portal to its current digital infrastructure.
According to Dr. Etika, the administration of the current Vice Chancellor, Prof. Francisca Bassey who assumed office on January 26, 2025, inherited a school in the midst of a difficult transition. He said the primary hurdle was a “handshake” failure between the legacy system and the new portal.
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“We had so much data in the old portal and we needed to move our data to the new portal. That became a problem,” Dr. Etika explained. “There were issues of funding. Unfortunately, the old portal was shut down. When it was shut down, we made concerted efforts to get data from the old portal to the new portal. It wasn’t working.”
The Director revealed that the university initially considered returning to “the basics” by manually retrieving hard copies of results dating back to the school’s inception in 2002. However, after significant pressure, he said the university successfully recovered some data out of over five million data points from the old cloud storage.
“We have successfully migrated data from the 2017 session to the 2023 academic session to the new portal,” he stated, noting that the massive move was completed within just two months. He admitted that while discrepancies are bound to occur when moving between different programming languages and syntaxes, the new system offers unprecedented transparency.
Dr. Etika emphasized that the new portal provides “real-time” access, allowing students to view grades in seconds after a lecturer uploads them. More importantly, he noted that the era of “buying and selling of grades” has been effectively ended.
“Before now, you could upload a result and update it. Now, the only time you can update a result is if the Vice Chancellor gives approval. The industry has been destroyed in terms of buying and selling of grades,” he said.
Addressing the recent protests and complaints regarding delays, the Director attributed some of the friction to a “system fighting back.” He alleged that certain “dirty lecturers” and students who previously benefited from a porous system are inciting unrest because they can no longer manipulate results.
“Some dirty lecturers can no longer do what they usually do. So they are fighting the system. They want the system to go back to Egypt where grades could be manipulated,” Etika alleged. He further noted that internal checks revealed that some students at the forefront of the protests have “litanies of carryovers.”
While acknowledging the genuine frustration of graduating students, Dr. Etika appealed for patience, stressing that accuracy is paramount.
“This is result you’re talking about and this is very sensitive. We risk confirming wrong degrees to students if we rush. We are a work in progress, and within a short time, this whole thing will be behind us,” he concluded.
The university’s management team that attended the press conference included Prof. Thomas Ojikpong, Deputy Vice Chancellor Administration; Prof. Stella Maris-Okey, Deputy Vice Chancellor Academic; Barr. Uno I. Ogban, Ag. Registrar, among others.
