“If you do not seal the holes, you will have to rebuild the walls,” (Swahili Proverb).
Year on year, the failure
rate in external examinations across the country keeps increasing without much sincere effort to tackle the anomaly. Time was when Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) candidates for professional courses like law, engineering, medicine had cut-off marks above 300 out of 400 points. Candidates with 250 marks were not sure of gaining admission into the universities.
Today, a candidate who scores 250 marks is being celebrated. The result of the 6th edition of the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) released last week indicated that only 47 candidates scored 250 and above, in the Paper Pencil Test (PPT) and Dual Based Test (DBT) modes of the UTME conducted across the country few weeks ago.
In 2013, out of 1,644,110, who sat for PPT and DBT, 10 candidates scored 300 marks and above, while 127,017 candidates scored 1-159 marks.
The result was so woeful that the House of Representatives had to summon the JAMB Registrar, Prof Dibu Ojerinde, for questioning.
The result of the previous year, 2012, was not any better. It revealed that out of over 1.5 million candidates who sat for entrance examination into tertiary institutions, only three scored 300 and above, while 601,151 got marks ranging from 200 to 249. In all, only 673,397 scored above 200 which could enable them gain admission into universities.
The O’ Level results could even be said to be worst with some years recording abysmal performance rate of above 70 per cent failure.
Expectedly, some people have expressed disappointment over these results, but honestly, I am not surprised at all.
As a matter of fact, I think these results are very impressive compared to the appalling standard of education in the country and if something is not done urgently, we may be in for worse situations.
Records shows that a particular school in Ghana has half of its population made up of Nigerian students. Many Nigerians today, send their children and wards to different African countries, Europe, America and even Asia in search of quality education, thereby enriching those countries.
But don’t be quick to condemn them. A tour of some public schools in the country would reveal a complete infrastructural decay. What of the quality of teaching and instructional materials? In many countries like Norway, the best graduating students of the year are engaged as teachers which explain the unbeatable academic record they have had over the years. In Nigeria, many people go into teaching due to unemployment or lack of better things to do. People with any qualification are employed as teachers and paid meagerly. Stories have it that some school certificate holders or even school drop-outs who were engaged by some private schools as care givers are also used as nursery schools teachers. In this case, you begin to wonder what those children were being taught.
The fact that more than half of the students who sat for university entrance examinations these past years failed raises questions on the quality of teachers that prepared them for the examinations. Teachers may want to accuse the students of being lazy and not taking their academic work seriously. They will blame students for spending most of their time on social networking, playing computer games and watching films. But the teachers can do better if they put more efforts and show more commitment, interest and zeal to their duties.
But then, it is impossible for one to give what he does not have. A recent newspaper report had it that some school proprietors raised alarm over the poor quality of graduates produced by various higher institutions in the country.
Indeed, the falling standard of education can be traced to so many factors. Education in Nigeria is poorly funded. This has led to poor infrastructure, inadequate hostel accommodation for under graduates, poor laboratory facilities and out dated teaching aids in the tertiary institutions. The direct results are the incessant strike actions by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), the on-going strike actions by Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP) poor academic and research work which translates to chunning out of half-baked graduates.
In the past, pupils who did not perform well in examinations were asked to repeat same classes. Today, the situation is different. Mass Promotion is the new trend. Even proprietor wants to prove that his pupils are the most brilliant; and to prove’ it they embark on mass promotion even when some of them barely know anything.
What of the parents? What are they doing towards ensuring that their children get quality education? Parents, particularly the fathers believe that having paid their children’s school fees, they have discharged their duties. Some parents don’t even care whether their children do their home work or not, or even take time to go through their school work. All their interest is in making money, believing that with money, they can buy quality education for their children.
That probably explains why some parents and even husband go to the extent of writing JAMB, WAEC for their children and wives. Some that might consider this measure extreme buy question papers or machineries to write exams for their children. One wonders what the future of such children will be like.
Obviously, the problem of education sector in Nigeria is multi-faceted and it needs a multi-faceted effort to tackle it if we must achieve vision 20:20:20. We’re talking about from the family up to the government; we all have a role to play. Unless we stop paying lip service to education, we will continue to have more failures.
It will amount to wishful thinking if parents think their children and wards will perform better in future examinations if they do not start now to pay attention to their academic works and guide them right.
For us to solve the problem of examination mass failure permanently, we must deal with the causes for as the Gullah proverb says, “You need to take care of the root in order to heal the tree.”

Calista Ezeaku