I have seen first class students who couldn’t write a project – Baba
Tukur Baba is a specialist in the sociology of pastoral societies. A professor of Sociology at the Usman Dan Fodio University,Sokoto, he has degrees from ABU, Missouri - Columbia,USA as well as the University of East Anglia.
The first class degree is becoming like the honourary doctorate which anybody can just get if he has the right connections. I have seen a lot of first class students who couldn’t write a project. That student couldn’t formulate a research question. It turned out that this student is only good at cramming and reproducing, and could not function outside of that context. I was highly disappointed. The sheer number of students we have, against a backdrop of inadequate teaching staff, our attitude as a country to staff training and development, all these allow all kinds of characters come into the system. Nowadays, the products of this same system are going back to the system. So, we recycle the problem, and of course, parents and guardians and other stakeholders, expect a high performance, and so I suspect there is a lot of corruption with students buying grades. It’s one of those tactics where you don’t have evidence to stand in a court of law. You know it happened, but you can’t prove it. For instance, some lecturers do bloc marking and you find people slipping through the system.
Some of them are glorified secondary schools, and my estimation is that close to 60% of the state universities would have collapsed totally if not because of the TeTfund intervention. The state governments set up these universities and they cannot sustain them. Go round the state universities,you will see more TeTfund projects, than you would see projects done by the state government, because the funds are not there. But they are producing first class using part time lecturers. I think the NUC figures that less than 60% of lecturers in Nigeria’s universities have PhDs, which is not good enough. This means the universities are using people who are not qualified. In some state universities,you find people with masters heading departments. It is an administrative function,but a head of department also provides academic leadership, quality control etc. Some will go and do coursework, and return and be teaching and writing thesis at the same time, doing administrative jobs and serving on committees. So, you cannot give full attention. In some universities, appointments have become a political matter. You see people with second class lower are getting employment as lecturers because of political interference, notes from senators, traditional rulers, or chairmen of committees.
Yes, I am shocked at this. On the other hand in a country such as ours, where people are very skeptical about the quality of work going on in Nigerian universities, the tendency is to for people to question this proliferation of first class degrees in the university system. Some people will feel justified to raise this alarm. On the other hand it will be probably too much of a rush to come to a firm conclusion that this is becoming embarrassing. If a university produces 500 first class degrees in five years, it boils down to 100 first class degrees in a year. It depends on the number of departments in a university. I cannot speak for many of these universities that do some of these things. But for one year to have 100 first class in a university,may be a little bit embarrassing. But we must not underplay the issue of quality, quality is of the essence, if you are going to be producing these people as if they are sausage rolls at the expense of quality. I know of many situations where the lecturers don’t mark the scripts ,but they have marks,and some very clever and hardworking external examiners have seen this,and brought it to the attention of the university authorities, and action is taken to the point of dismissing the staff from the university. There was no indication of the script being marked, but the marks are there. Sometimes, the number of students in a given department are so many, that the lecturers get tired of marking scripts. You don’t know whether you should hold the lecturers responsible. They are few in number, and the scripts are in hundreds, thousands and they get tired in the process of marking them. Either by accident or by design, you find some of these scripts not being marked. Besides,when you are marking scripts, sometimes, because of the quality of answers in the scripts, you don’t know what you are marking, whether you are marking the substance or you are trying to correct the English. The English is so bad ,and you get carried away by trying to mark English, as against looking at the substance or the subject and this complicates the work. Suddenly, you see them all with first class ,and that is part of the problem with the university system, and then the quality of those who enter the university, and the age which they enter the university,and the minimum is 18 years. But nowadays you find some far less than 18.