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Recalibrating varsity education through final year’s unified test

By Iyabo Lawal
07 February 2019   |   3:26 am
However laudable the idea that government should introduce a unified test for all final-year university students, some say such a suggestion comes across as a punishment to students for the ineptitude and mismanagement of their teachers and the government, writes Head, Education Desk, Iyabo Lawal. Legal luminary and founder of Afe Babalola University of Ado-Ekiti…

[FILE] Aare Afe Babalola, SAN

However laudable the idea that government should introduce a unified test for all final-year university students, some say such a suggestion comes across as a punishment to students for the ineptitude and mismanagement of their teachers and the government, writes Head, Education Desk, Iyabo Lawal.

Legal luminary and founder of Afe Babalola University of Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD), Chief Afe Babalola (SAN), is not one known for frivolities. He also does not mince words. A scholar and intellectual par excellence, he has devoted his time and resources over the years to educational development and philanthropy.  

So on January 21, when he climbed the rostrum to speak at the 10th matriculation ceremony and award for his university’s alumni who had done the institution proud in their academic and career pursuits, everyone present fixed their gaze on him.

Then, the legal giant and scholar chose his words carefully as he spoke.

“I want to suggest to NUC and the Ministry of Education that the final year students in all programmes across all our universities should take the same national final examinations,” he began. “This way, every university shall work hard to ensure that its students pass the national examination, thereby ensuring high standard in teaching and learning.”

The university administrator, by his words, is suggesting to the National Universities Commission (NUC) and the Federal Ministry of Education to adopt unified examinations for final year students in every course in Nigerian universities.

While his institution has continued to thrive and produced competitive graduates, same thing cannot be said about graduates of many other universities.

He added: “We have built new (a) generation of Nigerians – I mean, a new Nigeria. We are building students who are honest, morally upright and hard-working.

“I am going to present a position paper to the federal government on this and those with influences should join in pushing it. What we have done here in ABUAD is education revolution.”

What Babalola said is a pointer to the fact that the nation’s universities have become rotten template that has produced, over the years, incompetent graduates.

A somewhat related call was made in 2018 that students should spend an extra year in specialised institutions after graduation from the university. The never-before-imagined idea was the product of some brainstorming at the Ministry of Education perhaps under the chairmanship of an erudite personality.

The Minister of State for Education, Prof. Anthony Anwukah, believes that the rot in Nigeria’s universities is bad that it will require an extra year added to the years of study of students before they can be fit to explore the outside world.

It is apparent that Babalola and Anwukah agreed on one thing: graduates have to be made more competitive.

“The universities are producing products that are not matching the needs of the industries. I urge the committee of pro chancellors and committee of vice chancellors to end the decline in the standard of education. The SIWES projects introduced for a year’s industrial attachment for students has failed in the universities. It is not doing its role in bridging the gap between the universities and the industries,” the minister of state for education had insisted last year.

For his salacious idea to scale through, nationwide consultations will be required. Experts in the education sector, however, think that even if the idea is eventually accepted and implemented, it will only be a superficial treatment of deep-rooted malaise of the education system.

Like a great salesman who seems to know his products more than the manufacturer, Anwukah added: “We are trying to sell an idea, the proposal is to get into our university system the re-schooling concept – that is, you finish your university degree –may be add one more year as a finishing school project. I don’t know how it is going to sell.

“But the idea has come as a result of the failure of SIWES system in the universities. We try to address the relationship between the universities, the industries and the graduates: how they can fit in and we introduced the SIWES project and it is not working and it is not providing that bridge between the industries because the most industries are unwilling to accept most students on the SIWES programme.”

So, the minister said plans are under way to see whether an extra year can be added, “when a student finishes from the university he can now go out to industries for one year internship for that job”.

To buttress his point, he gave an example: “The law department has one extra year; after the law programme they (graduating students) go to Law School – doctors go for one additional year.”

One thing he is certainly right about is that the country cannot continue with the current education system and expect to have students who well qualified to be employed by quality employees-starved employers.

So, he asked: “Are we going to continue with the SIWES experiment which is not working or we are going to brace up to introduce an additional year of re-school whereby you spend that one year in any industry?”

Babalola is not oblivious to Anwukah’s plans regarding the extra year. It appears to him that as part of the quality control process to ensuring university graduates are fit for the larger society, in terms of intellect and pragmatism, a unified test – like the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME)– should be taken by all students set for graduation.

Yet, some have argued that, however laudable these ideas look, they come across as punishment to students for the ineptitude and mismanagement of their teachers and the government. They also feel that it is an added burden to parents and guardians who laboured so hard to give their wards an education.

Already, students sit for the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), National Examination Council (NECO), Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) Post-UTME tests to gain admission.

With the way suggestions are being made by those who should know better, it will likely be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for Nigerian students to gain admission into and graduate from the universities.

It is true that there is no smoke without fire. It is also true that the number of students graduating from Nigerian universities with first class degrees have more than doubled over the years, however, it can be argued that government-owned universities have produced more illiterate graduates in recent times than at any time in the nation’s history.

A former vice president and presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, rubbed salt into that wound last November when he said: “I was at the Nnamdi Azikwe University in Akwa in Anambra State on the invitation of the university. There is no student in public universities that can speak English in an error-free manner like the head boy of my secondary school, who just finished addressing us now. When the head boy of American University of Nigeria (AUN) Academy, Abdullahi Sani, started speaking, I was thinking it was one of the lecturers in AUN. But only for him to introduce himself as the head boy of the AUN Academy.”

When Atiku made that statement in November 2016 during a celebration organised by the management of AUN, he was only throwing a subtle jab at the falling education standard in Nigeria, particularly that of government-owned universities.

The stark reality, according to stakeholders is that publicly -owned universities now pride themselves in “certificated illiterates” and “unemployable graduates.”

A case in point is a reported case of three illiterate graduates of the Enugu State University of Science and Technology rejected by the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC).

As reported on many online media, the three ESUT graduates were found to be academically incompetent where they were posted to for their primary assignments in Abuja, Lagos and Kogi.

The Director General of NYSC had informed the National Universities Commission of the presence of corps members who displayed “glaring lack of academic ability and intelligence level expected of genuine Nigerian graduates, which were consistently exhibited by the three students from the Enugu State University of Science and Technology.”

The NYSC DG added, “As contained in the reports, the corps members exhibited signs of incompetence and low intelligence level which range from inability to complete registration formats correctly to not being able to teach pupils at nursery school level. These inadequacies led to their rejections by their employers in their various states of deployment.”

To uncover how the three illiterates graduated and were cleared to serve in the compulsory one-year programme, the NUC set up a panel, comprising officials of NYSC, Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) and the Department of State Services (DSS).

The mandate of the panel, signed by NUC Director of Quality Assurance, Prof. C.F. Mafiana, “is to fully investigate the report with a view to identifying the culprits, including others similarly mobilised and their collaborators, and ensuring sanctions accordingly.

From the foregoing, experts said it is not hard to believe when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) announced in 2015 that there were at least 65 million illiterates in Nigeria. What the figure did not indicate, though, was the number of illiterate graduates.

Mustard Bakare, the Managing Director, Pearson Nigeria, had said at that time: “This statistic is alarming for a number of reasons. Illiteracy has adverse impacts at both an individual and societal level. People who are illiterates are far more likely to live in poverty, facing a lifetime marred by poor health and social vulnerability.

“Economically, the impacts of illiteracy are also sizeable; workplace productivity, unemployment rates and even national GDP are all affected by a country’s literacy levels. With Nigeria’s illiteracy rate standing at just over 50 per cent, it is a matter of national urgency that we work to redress our literacy crisis.”

A year before that damning statistics, the vocal Catholic priest, Bishop Matthew Kukah, during a convocation lecture he delivered at the University of Uyo had noted, “We do not need to look far to know why our nation has seemingly lost its soul. Education, which constitutes the backbone, the central nervous system, of any nation, has collapsed in our country. It is not as if the system has been taken over by bad men and women. No. It is just that we have had a complete system collapse, triggered by years of military rule which had total disregard for systems and processes…. This has resulted in a fractured society with no shared values and no clear navigational aids.”

As a whole, education experts, public analysts and employers of labour have all described Nigerian graduates as “unemployable illiterates.”

From the foregoing, it is clear why the legal luminary suggested a unified final test for students about to graduate from universities.

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