SAN FRANCISCO, August 27, (THEWILL) – A former Minister of Education, Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, says the decision of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, to peg this year’s baseline for admission into universities in the country to an all-time low of 120 would worsen the already poor standard of education in the country.
Speaking in an interview with newsmen at the weekend, she described the measure as that of “running a race from top to bottom”, stressing that the examination board has outlived the purpose for which it was established.
The ex-minister stated that rather than conduct entrance examination for university admission, JAMB should only play a regulatory role while universities are granted autonomy to conduct their entrance examinations to determine the quality of students they want to admit.
“I will say no and there has to be much more intensity in determining what the qualification should be, and once we do that, it will set us way back to early child education. When I see society screaming about this cut-off mark they have done, I say you are wasting tears on a symptom.
“You need to go to the root of the problem, and that means we need to go back to the first phase in education, which is early child care, basic education and secondary education which ultimately determine the readiness of our children to university education,” she said.
Ezekwesili explained that the idea of establishing JAMB was that the government wanted to find a means of equalising standards under a federal system to ensure that you set the bar in a way that brings in everybody.
She said rather than attempting to lower standards at the tertiary level of education, the federal governments should take steps to correct the anomaly in the early stages education.
According to her, “What you then have to look at is, does it continue to be relevant as a standard setting mechanism to actually determine who gets to what university and how? I would say not anymore.
“What we need to do not is to make the role of JAMB an examination regulatory body and to grant the universities the kind of autonomy that would enable them determine the kind of students they want in their universities and the level of academic achievement that they must have to enter their universities and to do in such a way that you do not identify mediocrity.”
