Students finalizing their undergraduate studies at the National University of Rwanda (NUR) will no longer have to orally defend their dissertations before a lecturers’ jury to complete their studies, the Rector, Professor Silas Rwakabamba confirmed yesterday.

In the new arrangement, students will be submitting their works to the university after only two lecturers, the student’s research director and a proof reader, correct them and give marks basing on a written work.

"The logic behind it [stopping the oral defense] is that we have to keep up with other East African universities,” explained NUR’s Rector Prof. Silas Lwakabamba on phone, adding, "They [defenses] were taking so long yet students don’t have to delay.”

Prof. Lwakabamba said that the process of oral presentation of the dissertations involved three to four lecturers comprising the jury to mark the student after defending. 

Accordingly, these would spend a long time reading the work thus delaying the students’ passing yet the dissertation is one of the university’s assignments

He said that the university had a big number of students who graduated this year partly because most of them had delayed in the process of defending their dissertation works.

"Most of it was a backload,” he said of the last graduation of over 3000 students at the university in March.

The suppression of the defense process is good news for most of the students at the university.

Alexandre Rutikanga, a finalist student at NUR’s Faculty of Agriculture said that the practice was both unnecessary and costly.

"I think it is work reduced and I don’t even see the reason why it was there,” he said.

He said that some students would sometimes feel scared of defending their dissertations especially when they don’t trust their every day relationships with their lecturers.

"It sometimes happens that someone in a jury harasses you. This time, even if someone gives unfair marks, there will be ways to complain basing on the written work,” he said.

The university’s Director of Research, Prof. Verdiana Masanja, observed that the students were doing presentations that are not done by even many scholars at Masters level of education.

"For me it was completely a new tradition,” she said. "What matters is to make sure that students have done their researches.”

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