Students’ poor performance in WAEC exam is wake-up call
The West African Examinations Council exam is the major certifying exam for students who have undergone secondary education in Nigeria. The National Examinations Council (NECO) exam is the second certifying exams for secondary school students. Performance in both exams has since been dismal.
With only 31.2 percent (i.e.529, 425,000 out of 1,692,435,000 candidates) having credit pass in 5 subjects including English and Mathematics in the 2014 May/June West African Examination Council(WAEC) exam as against a 36.57 percent in 2013, and 38.81 percent in 2012, it is clear that not only that performance is dropping steadily, the below 50 percent performance in the last 7 years is an indication that the Nigerian secondary education system is terribly sick and requires an urgent, full-scale diagnosis, and deserving physicians.
According to concerned stakeholders who spoke to BusinessDay, the continual dismal performance rate in certifying examinations for secondary school students points to the poor quality of secondary education, and the lackadaisical conduct of education authorities, teachers, parents and students, and consequently the total abandonment of the education sector. It is a glaring indication that Nigeria’s secondary education system, just like the tertiary and primary systems is also troubled and in a state of decay. It is believed that the ongoing mobile telecom gadget revolution rather than empower students to learn is rather influencing the students negatively by making them very lazy. Students now spend a sizeable amount of their time on these gadgets to the detriment of their studies. Similarly, the failure of inspectorate units in the education ministries is a major hindrance to the acquisition and maintenance of education standards at all levels of education.
The Nigerian family institution is in crisis, arising from a misconception of parental roles and the pursuit of crass materialism against the proper upbringing of the youths. It is quite unfortunate that a lot of parents have abdicated their responsibility they owe their children academically, all in the pursuit of material wealth. As for the students, they see what the elders do and the value system common in the society. Their parents and the society does not see anything wrong in falsehood, applying short cut ,corruption, lying, cheating and over reliance on the results instead of a sustainable process. The teachers and the school administrators try as much as possible to survive from the difficult economic environment there by compromising the standards. Added to this is that most of them are not qualified or trained to be educators and teachers. They found their way to the classrooms by accident. Moreover, they are equally products of the same faulty educational system
In fact, the problem with our educational system is that it is a product of the Nigerian system. We should look at it from the pervasive corruption in the land, erosion of our value system, lack of good governance, bad policy implementation and the over importance placed on certificates. We are in a society that no longer respects merit and hard work; but easy access and admiration to unaccounted wealth, culture of lawlessness and faulty value system. Students and other stakeholders adopt short measures towards addressing the problems. This can be seen in the rampant examination malpractice, recruitment of unqualified teachers, inadequate funding and where funding is available outright embezzlement and corruption.
Hence, the government and other stakeholders need to address some of these pressing problems. We need to seriously look at our value system and some of the things the society promote knowingly and unknowingly like materialism, pervasive corruption in all segment of the society including family units; we should discourage students from the reliance on other means of passing exams and achieving success without the good old virtue of hard work. Also, there should be adequate funding of the education sector. While UNESCO recommended that 26% of the total budget be assigned to education, less than 10 percent is still being allocated to education. Timely payment of teachers’ salary and adequate welfare will reduce frequent strikes by teachers, while providing ample time to cover syllabus. And moreover, training and re-training of teachers is imperative if the students are to be adequately groomed to write their examination.