To whom it may concern,

This petition is with regards to the readmission process for PGDA that has been implemented by UKZN for the 2019 academic year.

As you may already be aware, the management of UKZN had informed the students on the 6th of December that they will be granting admission for repeat students based on merit, and that there will be a maximum of 270 students that will be accepted from both the Westville and PMB campuses. This is a significant decrease from 2018 and given the low pass rates and number of repeat students for 2019 this does not seem reasonable. Previously all applications for PGDA had been accepted and students were allowed two attempts at PGDA. Therefore, many students that wish to repeat PGDA at UKZN in 2019, had not applied elsewhere based on this premise. We hope that management will take this into account and implement the admission rule starting from the year 2020 as we were not afforded the opportunity to plan accordingly.

Many students will be negatively affected and may be left with no university to study at if their applications are rejected by UKZN due to the fact that we were only notified about the change in admission process after the application dates have closed at other universities and furthermore, after the close date of UKZN. If we had been informed about this decision earlier we would have sent in our applications to other universities as a backup and planned accordingly.

We hope that our concerns will be taken into account and we await a response from management.

Kind regards,

PGDA students.