The Student Representative Council comes to the aid of excluded students.

More than half the students who applied for readmission after being excluded because of poor academic performances have been readmitted back to university.

Students have normally failed more than half their subjects before being excluded.
If a student is excluded, they pay a fee and appeal to the faculty readmission committee (FRC). If the student is not granted readmission, they can re-appeal to the council readmission committee (CRC).

The CRC (made up of various academics and a student) then makes the final decision. 
The SRC’s Nombulelo Nyathela sat on several committees and explained that her job was to build an argument on behalf of the students.
“As a student representative, you would raise an argument so that the board sympathises with students.”
The composition of some CRC’s was distressing to Nyathela. “Previous SRC’s have complained about the composition. Five white men don’t understand when a black student says he was possessed.” When asked if she thought things were changing, she said she had just come back from a panel of white males only.

Nyathela said each committee varied. She gave the example of the health and science board who were “unsympathetic”.
SRC education and student funding officer Neo Letsatsi emphasised that students need to show the committee that they have tried to solve the problems that made them fail in the first place. He also said “they cannot have excuses like my grandmother died during exam time when they have been failing the whole year”.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
Nyathela said that students who said they had messed around last year were not given a second chance, although she believes that they deserve a chance if they are willing to pursue the appeal to the CRC level.

Engineering research assistant and lecturer Randall Paton, who sat on faculty readmission committees as a student, explains that academics want to help students get through degrees and realise that sometimes the excluded student is the first student from a family or village to go to university. They don’t “like to shoot the student down”, he said.

Paton said that because faculty readmission committees are made up of people who have taught the courses the student has taken and failed – they can recognise when students are not capable of that degree. So sometimes it is frustrating for academics when an excluded student is allowed back in by the CRC which is made up of academics from across the university who may not appreciate the type of degree the student is doing, he said.
Paton said faculties have “a responsibility to protect Industry”. He gave the example that “engineers are responsible for people’s lives” and graduates need to be fit for their jobs. However, Paton added that lecturers “are usually willing to help students they recognise as repeat students and will often go out of their way for them”.