Home and away
The failure rate of students in Nigeria gets worse
by the day. Last week, the West African Examination Council (WAEC),
released the results of the 2010 West African Senior Secondary Schools
Examination and only 24 percent of the students passed, “with credits
in Maths, English and three other subjects.” The rest cannot be
admitted in any university.
In Lagos, a volunteer corps decided to organise an
ingenious forum for some of the students, to find out why they failed
so badly. They blamed their teachers, the government, and the sheer
lack of facilities that forced them to do “alternative to practical” in
school leaving examinations. Many of them have never heard of a Bunsen
Burner. All of it sounded like excuses and more excuses.
But then Chidera Ota, a 16 year old Nigerian girl
born in London led the entire United Kingdom with 15A* in the General
Certificate for Secondary School (GCSE) released about the same time as
the Nigerian results. She got the grades in English literature and
language, Mathematics, Statistics, French, German, Latin, History,
Sociology, Chemistry, Biology, Physics and an IT qualification.
Now, Miss Ota is going to King’s School,
Canterbury, on a scholarship to study Chemistry, Physics, Biology,
Maths and Further Maths A-levels.
Yet there is another story even more remarkable: A
five year old Nigerian girl, little Dee Alli, also sat for the same
examinations.
And she passed – becoming the youngest person ever
to do so. And suddenly it didn’t look like the students at the Lagos
youth forum were just sounding off. Surely, if Alli and Ota were living
here, attending dilapidated schools, they couldn’t have achieved those
feats?.
The UK authorities have recently introduced the A*
as the highest grade in the GCSE examinations when too many students
were getting As.
In Nigeria, the decline continues unabated. Last
year, 98 per cent of the 234,682 who sat for the NECO examinations
failed to get the requisite five credits. The Registrar of NECO,
Promise Okpalla, said although there was a 1.2 percent pass, Kogi,
Bauchi and Ondo excelled in another field, leading other states in
examination malpractices.
Chidera and Dee show what could be if our educational system is better managed.
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