Many lecturers don’t mark the scripts – Baikie

Yes, I am shocked at this. On the other hand in a country such as ours, where people are very skeptical about the quality of work going on in Nigerian universities, the  tendency is to for people  to question this proliferation of first class degrees  in the university system. Some people will feel justified  to […]

Yes, I am shocked at this. On the other hand in a country such as ours, where people are very skeptical about the quality of work going on in Nigerian universities, the  tendency is to for people  to question this proliferation of first class degrees  in the university system. Some people will feel justified  to raise this alarm.

On the other hand  it will be probably too much of a rush to come to a firm conclusion that this is becoming embarrassing. If a university produces 500 first class  degrees in five years, it boils down to 100 first class degrees in a year. It depends on the number of departments in a university. I cannot speak for many of these universities that do some of these things. But for one year to have 100 first class in a university,may be a little bit embarrassing.

But we must not underplay the issue of quality, quality is of the essence, if you are going to be producing these people as if they are sausage rolls at the expense of quality. I know of many situations where the lecturers don’t mark the scripts ,but they have marks,and some very clever and hardworking external examiners have seen this,and brought it to the attention of the university authorities, and action is taken to the point of dismissing the staff from the university.

There was no indication of the script being marked, but the marks are there. Sometimes, the number of students in a given department are so many, that the lecturers get tired  of marking scripts. You don’t know whether you should hold the lecturers responsible. They are few in number, and the scripts are in hundreds, thousands and they get tired in the process of marking them. Either by accident or by design, you find some of these scripts not being marked. Besides,when you are marking scripts, sometimes, because of the quality of answers in the scripts, you don’t know what you are marking, whether you are marking the substance or you are trying to correct the English.

The English is so bad ,and you get carried away by trying to mark English, as against looking at the substance or the subject and this complicates the work. Suddenly, you see them all with first class ,and that is part of the problem with the university system, and then the quality of those who enter the  university, and the age  which  they enter the  university,and the minimum is 18 years. But nowadays you find some far less than 18.