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My niece visited me from Lagos recently. The visit was actually my prompting. Her mother had called to inform me of the girl's inability to pass her papers in the GCE exams. My deduction was that maybe the distractions in Lagos must have been responsible for this and changing environment, especially to an academic one, would provide a respite.
However, to my surprise, what she gave as a reason for failing her exams was totally different from what I thought. The refusal of her mother to register her to a Special Centre otherwise known as Solution Centres was her reason. Then I asked, when did solution centres or whatever they are called become a deciding factor for passing or failing exams? Her answer to this question was more stunning. “Uncle”, she said, “Passing GCE these days is not a function of the quantity or quality of what you read, rather, a function of how much you can pay to the solution centres”.
She went further to tell me that even a pastor father of her bosom friend paid fifty thousand naira to a solution centre where a "non-appearance" exam was organised for her friend. The friend, according to her, made an 'A' in all her subjects, so, rather than asking her to come to campus and read, I should give her money to go to a solution centre and register either for a "non-appearance" or "appearance-with-assistance".
A student was admitted to my department having scored 304 out of 400 in the matriculation exams. After his first year as a university student, his CGPA was 0.0. The meaning of this is that, in all the courses he offered in both semesters of Part One, he scored an "F". I then called him later to my office after he was served his letter of withdrawal for poor academic performance. I asked him to produce his GCE result and he did. Going through, I discovered he made an "A" in all but two of the subjects where he made a "B". At that point I began to wonder what must have happened to him. On further interrogation, he confessed that both the GCE and Matriculation exams were paid for and organised by the solution centres.
The evil many of the Tutorial Centres-turned-Solution Centres have done to education in Nigeria is beyond mention. More than 60% of Nigerian undergraduates are below average in knowledge. Many of them got into the university without writing the qualifying exams on their own. The study centre does all that. Many of the study centres make a lot of money during every exam. They collaborate with some greedy exam supervisors to perpetrate exam evils. I could remember it took me 8 months of rigorous reading to prepare for my matriculation exams, but students these days rely on the solution centres to pass such exams. This is a dangerous trend for the country's education and capacity development of youths. Interestingly, most law-makers benefited from the arrangement and for such law-makers to make laws checkmating the trend will require the grace of God.
The government and the older generation have a lot to do in this regard. If the present generation is allowed to move into the next with these attributes, the future of this country will not be the fancy of anyone.
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Biodun Uthman
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Comments
wow what a corrupt practice Lin K | May 15th, 2009
this is really a corrupt practice!
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