In the face of the difficulties encountered by millions of Nigerians seeking to gain admission into the various tertiary institutions across the country, Sulaimon Olanrewaju and Abodun Awolaja writes on the inherent defects in the United Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), organised by the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB).At the turn of the century,registering for external examinations was not only laborious, it was also agonising. Candidates and their parents would have to travel some distance to obtain the form, take it back to their place of abode to complete after which they would have to travel back to the point of purchase to return the form. After sitting for the examination, they would have to travel back to the examination centre to check the outcome of the examination.But with the deployment of technology, especially the internet, and innovation in the banking industry, all of that now has the semblance of ancient history. The stress of junketing from one end of the country to another for the purpose of obtaining or returning a form or even checking the result has been taken away by technology. Now, without leaving the comfort of their homes, candidates can pay for an external examination, download the form, fill same out and submit online. They do not even have to go through any undue stress to check the result of the examination; the result can be checked online as all the examination bodies in the country as well as institutions too have leveraged on technology to make life bearable for candidates and their parents or guardians. But that comes at a price, a high one at that.Before the advent of technology-aided examination administration, candidates would only need to pay once for an examination and everything would be taken care of. But again, that now has a veneer of medieval history as candidates are these days required to pay at almost every stage of the examination processing. Candidates pay to register for an examination, pay to check the result of the examination, pay to be interviewed, if it is one that requires candidates to be interviewed, and also pay to get the letter of admission in the eventuality of being admitted. This is not restricted to only post-secondary institutions; candidates seeking admission to secondary institutions also pay through their noses.A piece of information sourced on Tuesday, September 27, 2011 from the website of Command Secondary Schools for candidates sitting for the entrance examination into the schools has the following for candidates.At the turn of the century,registering for externalexaminations was not only laborious, it was also agonising. Candidates and their parents would have to travel some distance to obtain the form, take it back to their place of abode to complete after which they would have to travel back to the point of purchase to return the form. After sitting for the examination, they would have to travel back to the examination centre to check the outcome of the examination.But with the deployment of technology, especially the internet, and innovation in the banking industry, all of that now has the semblance of ancient history. The stress of junketing from one end of the country to another for the purpose of obtaining or returning a form or even checking the result has been taken away by technology. Now, without leaving the comfort of their homes, candidates can pay for an external examination, download the form, fill same out and submit online. They do not even have to go through any undue stress to check the result of the examination; the result can be checked online as all the examination bodies in the country as well as institutions too have leveraged on technology to make life bearable for candidates and their parents or guardians. But that comes at a price, a high one at that.Before the advent of technology-aided examination administration, candidates would only need to pay once for an examination and everything would be taken care of. But again, that now has a veneer of medieval history as candidates are these days required to pay at almost every stage of the examination processing. Candidates pay to register for an examination, pay to check the result of the examination, pay to be interviewed, if it is one that requires candidates to be interviewed, and also pay to get the letter of admission in the eventuality of being admitted. This is not restricted to only post-secondary institutions; candidates seeking admission to secondary institutions also pay through their noses.A piece of information sourced on Tuesday, September 27, 2011 from the website of Command Secondary Schools for candidates sitting for the entrance examination into the schools has the following for candidates.1. The entrance/registration form is for sale at Two Thousand Naira (N2,000.00) only.2. The form will be filled and submitted online;a. This can be done by the applicants or their parents/guardians on their behalf. However, the picture of the applicant must be used.b. The picture must be a passport photograph to be scanned to size 120x160 pxs of weight not more than 100kb3. To gain access to the form, each applicant isa. expected to supply a PIN (Personal Identification Number).b. This PIN is available at the back of Command Secondary Schools Scratch Card at the cost of N2,000.00 (Two Thousand Naira only).c. The scratch cards can be obtained from the following (the banks are listed).However, the website has more instructions for successful candidates who would need to participate in the interview session.Requirements for successful candidates for 2011/2012 Command Secondary Schools interview examination1. Candidates are to report to interview venue with the under listed requirements.a. Writing materials (HB Pencil and eraser).B. Photocopy of photo card (without which a candidate will not be tested).C. Letter of identification (Biological offspring of military personnel only).D. Evidence of completion of primary six.E. Birth certificate.F. Interview fee:(1). All other schools N 1,000.00 per candidate.(2). CDSS Ede, CDSS Makurdi and CDSS Ijebu-OdeN 500.00 per candidate.Paying for examination and interview is not restricted to military schools alone, even candidates seeking admission into state secondary schools are required to buy scratch cards to check the result of the examinations that is after paying to register for the examination. The cost of each scratch card ranges from N500 to N1500.To sit for examinations conducted by the West African Examination Council (WAEC), National Examination Council (NECO) or NABTEB, candidates have to register for the examination as well as pay for scratch cards to check the result of the examination.The scratch card has a life span; it ceases to be functional after the fifth use. If the candidate should need to check the result again, he will have to buy another scratch card. For NECO and WAEC that have two sets of examinations, May/June and October/November, a scratch card cannot be used to check the result of the two examinations. This means if a candidate sits for both the May/June and October/November examinations of WAEC for instance, he cannot use the same scratch card to check the result of the two examinations, he will have to get two different cards.For candidates seeking admission into universities, polytechnics or colleges of education, it is a different ball game altogether.The candidates pay the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB) to register for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), which is organised by the body. After the release of the result by JAMB, the institutions will come out with conditions for sitting for the post-UTME organised by each of them.If, for instance, a candidate makes the University of Ibadan his first choice of university and the Obafemi Awolowo his second, he will have to pay to write the post-UTME organised by each of the universities, after paying JAMB. Usually, the institutions are at liberty to fix the fee paid by the candidates. For some institutions, candidates have to pay to sit for the post-UTME, as well as to assess the result of the examination.Now, if the candidate is unlucky to be offered admission by either of the universities, he will have to try his luck at one of the polytechnics of his choice as stated in the JAMB form. Again, he has to pay to write the post-UTME in those institutions. If, again, the polytechnics do not offer him admission, he runs to the colleges of education and has to also pay to write the post-UTME of those institutions. At the end of the day, tens of thousands of naira would have gone into seeking admission into a tertiary institution without any assurance of getting a slot in any of them. According to JAMB chairman, only 350,000 of the 1,500,000 candidates seeking admission into tertiary institutions this year could be offered admission. For those who are eventually offered admission, they also have to buy scratch cards to print their admission letters from JAMB website.Explaining the rationale behind the post-UTME, Professor 'Deremi Abubakre, former Vice-Chancellor, Al-Hikmah University, Ilorin, Kwara State, said the post-UTME became necessary as tool for sifting the wheat from the shaft among candidates.According to him, 'The public examination system in the country is corruption-riddled, by the time corruption is removed from the system; the true performance of candidates will be unveiled. Note that the UTME is done in one day, which is why there is much corruption in the examination. We have had candidates who scored 309 in UTME but failed to score 200 in post-UTME.So, as a way of correcting this, institutions have to organise the post-UTME. But the problem with this is that some universities are using it to exploit candidates. This is so because the National Universities Commission (NUC) only has control over the revenue generation activities of federal universities. It does not have the power to control the revenue generation activities of both private and state universities. The last time I heard about it, the NUC pegged the post-UTME fee chargeable by federal universities at, I think N2,000. But state universities and private universities are at liberty to charge whatever they feel is right.But if a federal university is charging more than what the NUC has stipulated, such university should be reported to the appropriate authorities for sanction.'While expressing his frustration, a parent, Mr Chibuzor Ugochukwu, said the system had made it possible for institutions to fleece candidates without any opportunity of seeking redress.Ugochukwu, whose daughter's chances of securing admission into any institution this year are still in the air despite paying several thousands of naira as examination processing fees, lamented, 'It is very frustrating. You just keep paying and paying without any hope of getting what you are paying for and without any opportunity of seeking redress. Every right thinking parent would want the best for his child. So, initially one would not mind paying but it gets to a point that you sit down and ask yourself, 'what is the essence of all these payments'' For instance, in my daughter's case, we paid for post-UTME in two universities but the question is, will the poor girl go to two universities at the same time' The right thing is for everything to be streamlined such that after the UTME, a candidate, if he has to pay at all, will only pay for the post-UTME in one institution. That should be the function of JAMB. I don't think it is right for JAMB to leave the candidates unprotected because the duty of admitting students into tertiary institutions is that of JAMB. Therefore, if the process has a problem, JAMB cannot be exonerated.'Another parent, Mrs Bisi Ajulo, believed the multi-layered payment was instituted to weed off children of the poor from post-secondary education.According to her, 'I think it is a deliberate attempt by government agencies to put stumbling block in the way of the children of the poor. If you have to pay about five times to secure admission into an institution, it is an indirect way of telling the poor not to bother to seek admission into tertiary institutions.'Ajulo, whose son's hope of admission into a tertiary institution this year is hinged on his ability to scale the hurdle at the Osun State Polytechnic, Iree, said the Federal Government should intervene in this matter before it became difficult for the children of the poor to get admission into tertiary institutions.But Mr Stephen Oyakhire viewed the matter from another perspective.According to him, 'In other climes deployment of technology does not only make life easier, it brings down cost. Why is it that with the deployment of technology in our own country, we have to pay more'Something is simply out of place. I think the problem is that nobody is regulating the process and the institutions are just carrying on as they deem fit, no matter the inconvenience that they subject the citizenry to. How on earth will an institution charge candidates to check their result' Is the examination process complete without the release of the result' I acknowledge the fact that they will have to bill the candidates for the examination but what many of them charge is simply unreasonable.'A university lecturer, who pleaded for anonymity because he lacked the authority to speak on behalf of his institution, said many of the institutions were charging exorbitant fees for post-UTME because they saw the examination as a way of boosting their internally generated revenue (IGR).According to him, 'The institutions, especially the first generation universities which are the choices of many candidates, see the money from conducting post-UTME as a way of increasing their IGR. They are catching in on the fact that parents are anxious to get their wards admitted. So, they have steadily upped the fees charged for post-UTME. I am aware that some of these institutions include revenue from the post-UTME when they are preparing their budgets. If not for that, how much does it cost to organise an examination of this kind' For the institutions, it has gone beyond merely assessing the competence of the candidates, it has become a money making venture.'But in the words of Mr Lasun Shomoye, Head, Public Relations, University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Ogun State, his university billed candidates for post-UTME because they (candidates) had to pay for the examination.He said, 'For us, the essence of billing students for post-UTME is to underwrite the cost of the examination because that is a service that must be paid for. But be that as it may, the purpose of conducting the examination is not for the university to generate revenue; hence the fee we charge is in accordance with what the Federal Ministry of Education has approved. This year, we only asked candidates to pay N1,000, which is the fee approved by the Ministry of Education and we did not ask candidates to pay to assess their result; candidates only paid once and that took care of everything.'Mrs Halima Abubakar, a trader whose daughter is hopeful of being offered admission by a polytechnic this year, having scored 209 in the UTME, demonstrated the helplessness of candidates and their sponsors in the hands of tertiary institutions in her answer to the question that would she report an institution that asked her daughter to pay a high fee for post-UTME to the authorities or simply pay the money. She had said, 'Me report' I will not report. I will only pray that God should provide the money with which to pay.'meanwhileLamenting the epileptic powersupply by the defunct NationalElectric Power Authority (now Power Holding Company of Nigeria) at the outset of the current Republic, late Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Federation, Chief Bola Ige (SAN), said 'the causes of this downturn are organisational, technical and social.'Much more can be said of the downward trend in Nigerian education, particularly as evidenced by the phenomenon of mass failure in public examinations, such as those conducted by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), the National Examinations Council of Nigeria (NECO) and the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB). For instance, for the fourth consecutive time, the results of the June /July 2011 Senior School Certificate Examinations released by the National Examinations Council on Friday, September 23 at its National Headquarters, Minna, Niger State capital, showed another scenario of mass failure, with only about 25 per cent of the candidates scoring credits in the core subjects like Mathematics and English.Speaker of the Osun State House of Assembly, Najeem Salaam, bemoaned the result, saying it pointed to the fundamental decay in the nation's education sector. To him, desperate measures were required to rescue the nation from the quagmire of the collapse of the educational sector. For its part, the House of Representatives, which has always launched probes into the mass failure issue, is currently engaged in a probe of the anomalies of this year's O-level examinations. Still, it is not all a tale of woe. For example, statistics by private secondary schools in Ibadan, Oyo State, such as Nickdel Model College, Oluyole International College, Kings and Queens College, show a pattern of redemption. For instance, at Nickdel College, Ibadan, none of the 64 candidates who sat the May/June WAEC exam scored less than a B in English; 23 out of 64 had As or Bs in Mathematics, while no candidate failed any of the Science subjects. At Queens and Kings, as many as seven candidates recorded distinctions in the entire nine subjects.However, these schools are elite schools, the exception rather than the norm.Indeed, whether on a social, cultural or pedagogical plane, the foundation of mass failure in public examinations has perhaps remained largely unshaken, in spite of statements to the contrary by successive governments across all levels. Indeed, a cursory look at statistics of examination results from 1990 to the present shows a consistent pattern of failure, when allowances have been made for the misinterpretation of the results released by NECO at the inception of its Senior Secondary certification in 2000. The 2000 NECO results, at which many candidates were said to have had a jumbo harvest of good grades, were not actually significantly different from those conducted by the rival and boastful WAEC, as less than 43 per cent of the total number of registered candidates had five (5) credit passes in the examination.Still, scholars such as Professor Taoheed Adedoja, immediate past Minister of Sports and Special duties, point to the phenomenon of mass failure as a global trend, drawing on statistics released by education ministries of European and American countries, with analysts indicating, quite paradoxically, that candidates would record better performance if they put as much effort as they put into cheating in public exams into actual preparation for the exams.For his part, Ayo Banjo, Emeritus Professor of English and former two-term Vice Chancellor, University of Ibadan, insists that O-Level candidates' failure in most subjects are actually failures in English, the language of instruction. Still, this question of English Language pedagogy raises a perplexing mix of sociolinguistic questions on its own, including whether, in the face of the lack of a global standard, the British English or English as a Mother Tongue (EMT) model currently being tested in Nigeria's public examinations despite the country's English as a Second Language (ESL) setting does not constitute a pedagogical abnormality; and whether, if an ESL model is to be adopted in the widespread acknowledgement of the inevitability of Nigerian English, there is sufficient agreement as to what constitutes Standard Nigerian English (SNE), also called Variety Three in the cline set up by Ayo Banjo. Thus, the perpetual questions: When will English Language testing become faithful to the Nigerian sociolinguistic environment' When do we test Nigerian English and which Nigerian English'Although Chief Examiners of the examination bodies themselves have, in writing their assessment of the candidates' performance in the examinations, always laid the blame for poor performance at the doorsteps of candidates and their teachers, analysts are of the view that sufficient grounds exist for doubting the validity of results released by them. Interestingly, at a recent workshop for markers of answer scripts in Minna, Niger State, the Registrar and Chief Executive of NECO, ProfessorPromise Okpala, admitted that there were noticeable lapses in the marking and scoring of candidates in the last examination.'We have had cases of candidates who lodged complaints on their results, only for us to discover that, after marking, there were sharp differences in the scoring .'However, as noted by analysts, NECO's acceptance of responsibility for the anomaly, though salutary, should only have spurred it towards greater efforts at tightening the examiner recruitment process, paying much more enhanced wages to its examiners, who complain of poor pay (for instance N7, 112.5 for 250 scripts), as well as undertaking a comprehensive review of the examination and grading process. For its part, the WAEC created confusion in the educational sector when it released conflicting results for this year's May/June Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination.It had, at first, released the first result on August 10, indicating that only 472,906 candidates, representing 31 per cent of the candidates who sat for the examination, obtained five credits, including English and Mathematics. However, speaking at a press briefing convened by the Minister of State for Education, Nyesom Wike in Abuja, the Head of the National Office of the body, Dr Iyi Uwuadiae, another result, which was not checked by its Quality Controls Department was released on its website on August 26. The second result showed candidates being given different grades from the ones that were first made available on the WAEC website, thus creating problems for many candidates, some of whom had already sent the first results to higher institutions where they were seeking admission.In fairness to WAEC and NECO, computational errors by examining bodies are a global phenomenon. To take just one example, The Guardian of London reported in its Saturday, Jul 19, 2008 edition that over the past month, the examining body, ETS Europe, had not only been handling the biggest crisis in SAT history but also one of the toughest recruitment jobs in finding a new marking director.Minutes of the Qualification and Curriculum Authority meeting when the decision was made to give ETS the 165m contract to process 9.5m papers that summer and for the next four years said they offered 'best value for money', but it soon transpired that theirs was also the cheapest bid and there were only a handful of other contenders.The conservatives, who first warned ministers of the problems surrounding ETS in May, produced a dossier on the board's record. In 2002, software errors by ETS led to serious failures, including giving the wrong marks, in the graduate management admission test (GMAT). Further, the New York Times reported in 2004 that mismanagement by ETS led to over 40,000 teachers taking a flawed exam. Thousands were given the wrong marks and there was a shortage of teachers. ETS paid millions of dollars in compensation.In 2006, the ETS was criticised for failures with graduate record examinations. Liz Wands of the test preparation company, the Princeton Review, gave a damning verdict: 'ETS has never met a deadline they've set.' And schools minister, Jim Knight, said that one factor in that year's problems was the 'different style of management' to the previous, British-based companies.Still, the nature of the examination itself has been faulted by many. For instance, in the case of WAEC, designers of the English Language test expect candidates to tackle two comprehension passages, a passage on summary writing, as well write a 450-word essay, all under two and a half hours. Again, the examination contains specialised questions on grammar (grammatical names and function, e.g noun clause) which are best reserved for candidates intending to study language-related courses. These lapses have led analysts to conclude that the examination suffers a dose of 'grammar fatigue' at the expense of functional communication; that is, it tests what the candidate supposedly knows about English rather than what he/she can do with the language. Sadly, the teaching of English and other subjects in the secondary school is largely based on the conceptually flawed and largely outmoded syllabuses of the examining bodies and their past questions.Next, the candidates themselves have often been accused of approaching the examination from a defeatist perspective.Although statements by the Reading Association of Nigeria (RAN), the Nigeria Union of Teachers(NUT) and other professional bodies have always painted a dismal picture of the reading culture in Nigeria, there appears to be a trend in recent times to apportion blames in relation to the social media. Increasingly, students are accused of spending more hours on Facebook, Twitter, Badoo, Netlog, Hi5, Skype, Eskiini, Black Planet, among others, than they spend on their books. It is also said that most secondary school students are unaware of thrillers such as the James Hadley Chase series, African Writers Series, Pace Setter series and others which served as preparatory grounds for most of today's competent users of English.And teachers. In most of the nation's public schools, the story used to be of poor pay, inadequate or non-existent teaching aids, inadequate teaching staff, among others. Indeed, even though the minimum teaching requirement for secondary schools is a first degree, teachers with lesser grades abound in the system. Indeed, the Kano State government, in 2009, was accused of recruiting expatriate teachers from the Arab countries to cushion the shortfall in the teaching staff strength, of which only 15 per cent were said to have the requisite qualifications, when teachers abounded in the southern part of the country.Sadly, there are no quick solutions, and even long-term solutions are yet to be given serious thought. Currently, in sharp contrast to the UNESCO's recommendation that governments give 26 per cent of the national budget to the education sector, the Federal Government has, since the inception of the current Republic, failed to allocate half of that figure to the sector, with disastrous consequences for the future of the country.President Goodluck Jonathan's Bring Back the Book Initiative is a salutary effort, but more of such initiatives are necessary. At the regional level, although forums such as the Northern Governors Forum, BRACED Governors Forum (of the South-South states), among others, exist, concerted efforts to tackle the rot at a regional level are yet to emerge. Thus the question can be asked whether the political leadership across different levels intends to have an educated populace or not.
Click here to read full news..
