Razan Al-Towaireqi told Arab News that the university system was not helpful to the affiliated external students.

“I am a first-year student and I used to do extremely well in secondary school. Yet I find the university lessons hard, mostly because of the poor online system.”

Another difficulty the off-campus students generally face according to Al-Towaireqi, is finding the section to which each student belonged. “A student should write her examination in a separate hall for each section. The information about the section is only available online. When the examination approaches, the websites become inaccessible,” Al-Towaireqi said.

Dalal Al-Zahrani, another first-year student, said freshman girls wasted their precious time on the first day of examinations searching for their sections and halls.

“Finding the section is vital, because the examination is close to it. If a student does not go to her hall, she is sure to fail in the exam,” Al-Zahrani said.

She added that she was one hour and a quarter late for one of her examinations, because she did not know her section. The university examination schedule did not specify the location of her section, she said.

“On the first few days of the examinations, supervisors allowed us to write in any hall without insisting on our sections. Later, the supervisors ordered us to go to our respective sections, which we did not know,” she said.

Sareen Al-Ahmadi, another freshman, complained about the inefficiency of the officials who handled the matters of the distance-education students online. “The website showed that I failed in math. However, as I was sure that I could not fail, I checked with the Students’ Affairs office and found out that I scored excellent marks in it.”

She believed that it was unfair to evaluate the students on the basis of written examinations alone. She added that she feared she would fail because she was one hour late, searching for her examination hall and section.