Dix­ie Ann Dick­son

Frus­trat­ed Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) stu­dents protest­ed on Mon­day at the St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus call­ing on lec­tur­ers to re­lease their ex­am re­sults.Af­ter weeks of wait­ing in vain the frus­trat­ed stu­dents even­tu­al­ly voiced their con­cerns.

Clad main­ly in red and black, they protest­ed silent­ly as they made their way to the ad­min­is­tra­tion and prin­ci­pal's of­fices, hop­ing to find out why their ex­am­i­na­tion re­sults for last se­mes­ter had not yeet been re­leased. Year two un­der­grad­u­ate stu­dent An­war Baksh said: "We be­lieve we are be­ing held to ran­som be­cause the lec­tur­ers have not re­ceived their salary in­crease." He said the move to with­hold stu­dents' re­sults was un­fair be­cause stu­dents need­ed to know them in or­der to move on. "This is af­fect­ing the stu­dents and we are ap­peal­ing to the new gov­ern­ment to act swift­ly on the mat­ter so that stu­dents would not be held ran­som," Baksh said.

West In­dies Group of Uni­ver­si­ty Teach­ers (WIGUT) has been in ne­go­ti­a­tions for in­creased salaries for lec­tur­ers and im­proved se­cu­ri­ty for lec­tur­ers and stu­dents. Re­ports stat­ed WIGUT was call­ing for a rate with­in the range of 14 to 27 per cent, which was the in­crease lec­tur­ers on the Cave Hill, Bar­ba­dos, and Mona, Ja­maica, cam­pus­es re­ceived for the same pe­ri­od–Au­gust 2009 to Ju­ly 2011. Dur­ing a tele­phone in­ter­view, vice pres­i­dent of WIGUT, Dr Bheshem Ram­lal, said: "We have with­drawn our en­thu­si­asm but we are will­ing to show the stu­dents their grades. "We are not up­load­ing the grades on Ban­ner (UWI's on­line stu­dent por­tal) but stu­dents can con­tact or vis­it their lec­tur­ers for their grades. "We have been placed in a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion, but we are will­ing to ac­com­mo­date stu­dents be­cause we un­der­stand their predica­ment," he added.