DAMASCUS, Syria (North Press) – After her repeated failure in an economic subject in a faculty in the University of Damascus, Ala Wahba (a pseudonym), a third-year university student, decided to ask the professor for help and meet him in his office.
“I was surprised for his rude frankness when he asked me for a physical relationship in exchange for passing the subject,” Wahba told North Press.
His request had a psychological effect on Wahba, and despite her multiple appeals for a passing grade, still failed the subject.
Many professors at the University of Damascus resort to “harassment, bribes, and sometimes mediation” to pass students.
On June 8, Damascus University revoked the doctoral degree of a professor in the Agricultural Engineering Faculty, which she had been granted six years ago, after it was discovered that she had stolen her research thesis.
“The reality of granting doctorate certificates in Syrian universities today is faced by many negative aspects, chief among them that the new professors do not have a second language; neither English nor French,” a professor of Tishreen University, who preferred to be unidentified, said.
Harassment
Wahba is in her fourth year now and is still failing the same subject. “I am not guilty, but my professor wants to have a physical relationship with me in exchange for passing the subject,” she explained.
“I am not the only one who has been propositioned; the professor of the subject is well-connected and does not care,” Wahba added.
A doctor in the same faculty stressed that the professor has a bad reputation in the university, and is also “unfamiliar with his specialization, and does not deserve to be in a prestigious university like Damascus University.”
“Even the dean of that faculty was removed from his position several months ago for the same reasons,” he added.
“I have entered the office of the dean only once in two years, because his office is always busy receiving female students exclusively,” he referred.
“Some female students visit the dean repeatedly amid an atmosphere of smoking and drinking coffee, as if it is a café and not the office of a dean of a faculty,” he pointed out.
Bribery
Outside of requests for sexual relationships, there are other ways in which students failing a subject can pass their exam, such as bribery. This is what happened with Samir al-Ali, a student of the Faculty of Political Sciences at Damascus University.
“A professor asked me for an amount of money in order to pass the exam,” al-Ali told North Press.
He said that he paid the required amount, regardless of if he deserves to pass the subject or not. He justified this by saying that the professor will not give him the passing grade unless he pays.
In April, all the students of the Political Sciences Faculty failed the French language subject exam of the second semester.
At the time, Dean of Faculty of Political Sciences Faten al-Sahwi attributed the reason “to the decline in the students’ level and the lack of the number of applicants for the subject (19 students) of the total number,” she told al-Khabar TV.
On March 10, 600 instances of cheating were recorded in different faculties, according to a statement given by the Deputy of Administrative Affairs at Damascus University Subhi al-Bahri to a local radio.
Low rates
“The grades of a subject of the third year were published on the university website for five minutes on 5/5/2021,” Nujood Muhammad, a student of the Faculty of Law in Damascus, told North Press.
“Some were able to find their grades to be shocked that they got one grade, 15 or 35 as a highest grade,” she added.
“The passing grade of the subject was 15%, in violation of the university’s organizing law, which stipulates a passing grade must not be less than 20%,” she referred.
“The subject was submitted to the university’s presidency for re-correction, but it was not re-corrected and returned as it was,” she pointed out.
She believed that what happened was a kind of struggle between the faculty’s deanship and the university presidency, which refused to re-grade the exam papers.
“The case has not been decided yet,” according to an official source from the Faculty of Law.
“The faculty’s deanship sought to form a special objection council for this subject,” the source added.
The deanship promised that each one submits an objection “will benefit by reviewing the whole of his paper for re-correction not only by the normal way of only collecting grades.”