IT has changed the learning process - Abubakar
Tanimu Abubakar is a professor of Literature at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, a one-time ASUU president, he has also been chairman ASUU, ABU, and is a former head, Department of English and Dean Student Affairs.
Has there been a rise in the award of first class degrees by our universities?
There has been a paradigm shift in pedagogy,in the learning process,with increasing interest on quantifiable smart scientific answers, in line with the methods that information technology has imposed on the world. This is the tendency to go towards precise,concept based, word based articulation of things,which sometimes the teaching of various subjects,not all the subjects ,approximate. When you have this type of situation,it is much easier for students to score higher grades. All of these naturally account for the propensity for slightly above average students to score a higher mark. It is possible that within the system of teaching and learning,changes that have occurred in the last 20/25 years, have gradually led towards a system of teaching and learning and award of marks that seem to open the space for the possibility of slightly above average students getting higher scores, than normally they would get in the older system. All of these put together still do not, cannot explain the astronomical rise in the first class degrees. So, the question still remains what really is responsible for this? But not every university has that tendency. Here in Zaria the number is moderate. In my department we have not had any first class in the last 20/25 years. The department itself has not produced more than six since it was established in 1962. So,there are places where this is not the case, but we still have to look for answers. One of the possible answers is there is at the level of policy, at either government or the ministry of education, or TeTfund,there has been the tendency to reward first class holders with scholarships. There is a scholarship scheme or training scheme,or some kind of scheme, that seeks to favour those who have first class ,second class upper and so on. Students from some of these universities get scholarships to read courses abroad,faster if they have first class ,than they would if they had a second class upper or second class lower.
Are the private universities a problem?
I think the emergence of private universities has created more problems,and may have complicated the problem. This is because the private universities emerged with a very strong competitive orientation. They came out to compete against public universities, and what they tried to do was to say well, we are going to do things differently. There are three areas in which a lot of emphasis has been placed. First, they have stable calendars. In other words they don’t have political disruptions. Next, they are using state of the art facilities, and the most up to date teaching methods. Thats where the problem starts from. You end up in the humanities where you are used to essays, answers that demand substantial writing, to questions that are now computer based and which require concise answers, which sometimes look for just certain concepts. So, you can have a student that is not particularly sharp, but knows the concept and writes them out in a small computer designed answer. If the score is five, he gets five and this is global. When you start dealing with this,the tendency is that people are going to make very high scores essentially because the answers that are required are concepts and terminologies, are direct correlations. They do not require the complex debates,disc ussions,postulations that an essay would require. This is the problem and unfortunately it has become part of the rating system. The new universities will then say we have this. With a stable calendar,state of the art facilities, new teaching methods and we produce high quality degrees. It started with the private universities, and nobody cared to mediate, and gradually the public universities went into it.