Reservations trail post UTME cancelation, 180 cut-off mark

When Adamu Adamu, the Minister of Education announced Thursday, June 2, 2016 that the Federal Government has scrapped the post Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME) in Nigeria, it drove shocks waves down the spine of many who have been watching the sector keenly. This is because the decision is bound to affect the nation’s education system in more than few ways.

“As far as I am concerned, the nation has confidence in what JAMB is doing, the universities should not be holding another examination and if the universities have any complaints against JAMB, let them bring it and then we address it,” Adamu had said.

The other development is that government and stakeholders in the education sector have also pegged 180 as benchmark for 2016 admissions into universities, polytechnics and colleges of education to improve the quality of education in Nigeria. Implying the cut-off mark has been lowered by 20 points. It remains unclear how populating schools with hundreds of thousands of less qualified candidates will improve the quality of education in the country.

Adetunji Adegbesan, founder and CEO Gidimobile, an education technology company, in his response to the adoption of 180 cut-off mark pointed out that this amounts to an official endorsement of mediocrity.

“It is alarming that the minister dropped the bar this low. Whilst we are faced with falling standard in our education system, policies should be designed to raise the standard not lower it. The failure rate at the Senior Secondary Certificate Examination is alarming. Some states especially in the North recorded 98 percent failure rates,” Adegbesan said.

Darlington Agholor, lecturer at the School of Business Administration, PanAtlantic University, Lagos, in an impassioned remark contended that 180 as cut-off mark is quite poor. Out of a total possible score of 400 marks, 180 is less than 50percent, this means there is a general drop in performance and we should be worried.

Like the current administration is doing with the economy, the latest announcements from the federal ministry of education is sure to set the education system back in an attempt to ‘improve’ the state of the nation’s education system.

According venturesafrica.com, this development will boost enrolment without a commensurate increase in carrying capacity because institutions already have a culture of admitting numbers that exceed their capacity by an average of 1,500 more students. The combined carrying capacity of all public tertiary institutions in Nigeria is less than 800,000, with universities, alone, accounting for about 600,000. According to the registrar of JAMB (the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board), 1.2 million students scored above 180 in the 2016 UTME exercise, making the number of candidates now eligible for university admission twice the amount of seats available. Despite this glaring dissonance, there are no plans to increase the admission quotas of each university and the Minister made it clear that universities will be sanctioned if they go beyond their capacity.

Before the era of post-UTME, most universities exercised their autonomy over admissions by setting the bar higher than JAMB’s 200/400 cut-off mark for various disciplines, some courses like Medicine and surgery were as high as 250, and the higher the score, the greater the odds. Dibu Ojerinde, the Registrar of JAMB, while talking to journalists after the meeting last week said, “[the] 180 benchmark is even, no one will go below it this year. Universities can go above it.”

A return to the pre post-UTME system will almost guarantee that the odds remain the same for the additional number of students made eligible by the downward review to 180, regardless of the course of choice, because on the basis of merit, universities will admit starting from the highest score.

The Academic Staff Union of Universities has responded to these changes through its new President, Biodun Ogunyemi, who emphasised that the laws establishing universities empowered the Senate of each institution to determine the conditions for admission and graduation of students. He noted, “It is the duty of the university senate to set the cut-off marks for each of their programmes and set the guidelines to determine who is qualified for admission.”

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board needs more than a vote of confidence from the minister of education to improve its capacity to conduct examinations without widespread complaints of technical failure and malpractice. His talk of JAMB’s competence should have brought his confidence in the preparedness of students, particularly on computer literacy and the skills they need to successfully complete a computer based test (CBT) into question, as this still remains a serious issue for economically disadvantaged students attending public schools.

Focusing on test scores and exams won’t make students more knowledgeable, at best it increases anxiety. But this would have been our concern if the ministry was increasing the bench-mark for JAMB; sadly the opposite is already in place. This means that our already dysfunctional education system is placing less scholastic demands on secondary students and delivering as much as 5 percent less brilliant students to universities.

One would expect that the minister’s more popular strategy to improve the quality of education would be how he planned to use the N369.6 billion assigned for education in the 2016 budget to make key investments in education infrastructure and human capacity development. One of these strategies would include updating our curriculum that is bloated with prehistoric information and bringing it to the present, with the aim of igniting the fire of innovation and inquisitiveness in this era. Manuals and instructions have to reflect the demand that this age of information places on the current generation. Also, the quality of teachers in the nation should be of utmost concern as well as providing good working conditions for teachers and learning conditions for students across the board.

These new policies will not motivate the secondary students to sit face-down any longer, burning the midnight oil. Its only aim is to increase the quantity of people eligible for university admission without any consideration for quality and this is something that Afe Babalola, who is the founder of Afe Babalola University, is worried about. He said recently: “I am more than shocked by the announcement that the post-UTME as part of the qualifying procedure for admission to Nigerian universities has now been cancelled…This, to me, is nothing but a most calamitous mistake, which poses danger and an irreversible, adverse effect on the quality of education in this country.”

There is a saying that a nation cannot develop higher than its quality of education. At a time when Nigeria needs it’s youthful population to set high expectations, academically, and push themselves harder creatively, to increase the global competitiveness of its workforce, the Nigerian government is telling students that it’s okay to score 45 percent. How is the ministry of education not seeing that to increase or at least maintain the growth trajectory of our economy, public services and the private sector needs innovative and forward-thinking people with a culture of excellence? In Nigeria today, government policies are placing more demand on citizens causing them to work harder to meet with rising cost of living. But it appears the minister of education has not gotten the memo, because his policies are dragging Nigerians in the other direction by demanding less from the educational system especially students, thus promoting laziness. The price for everything, but academic excellence, is up.

STEPHEN ONYEKWELU