It is no longer news that about 70 per cent of candidates who sat for this year’s May/June Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination conducted by the West African Examination Council (WAEC) failed the exam.
Many factors have also been identified to be responsible for this embarrassing outing which has become a norm in the recent years. But no one until now has pointed the fact that the students’ poor performance, especially in external exams could be linked to the free education enjoyed by them.
As a reaction to National Mirror exclusive story of last week in which students attributed their failure to the poor attitude of their teachers to work, among other factors, teachers on their part, disagree, saying the claim is unfounded.
Medinat Oyero, a teacher at High Standard College, Iyana- Ipaja, Lagos, for instance, said many students always want to cut corners not only in exams but also in other spheres of life.
“What do you expect in a situation where such does not work out eventually? It is mass failure of course,” she stressed.
Oyero with over 15 years experience noted that rather than many of the students to study hard and pass exams on their own efforts, they prefer looking for special centres where they will cheat to get good grades.
Also, a Lagos-based principal, who preferred anonymity, said the love for internet and browsing has prevented many students from taking their studies very seriously and that many parents are not also bothered to monitor activities of their children after school hours.
“Even many parents do not care whether their children get to school or not and in a home where such is the order of the day, parents should not be expected to visit their children in schools.
And all this is just because they don’t pay school fees and neither do they pay exam fees any longer. The educationist, who is of the opinion that students should begin to pay at least WAEC fees except those from extremely poor homes, said it was only through such that many of them and their parents would sit tight. Mr. Abiodun Lawal, a teacher with a public school in Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State also believes that students’ failure is their own making.
According to him, the work of the teacher is to teach well in class and to cover syllabus and once these are done; the rest is for the students. “You can only take horse to a river you cannot force it to drink water.
That is the perfect situation between teachers and students in this respect,” he stressed. Lawal noted that records have shown that the poor attitude of both the students and their parents to standard increased with the introduction of free education policy under this dispensation and the payment of students’ WAEC fees by various state governments.
He therefore advised that government should either stop paying the WAEC exam fees or share the money with the students’ parents to enhance performance.
Like Lawal, a teacher with one of the Federal Government colleges in Lagos who spoke on condition of anonymity, agreed that majority of the students are not ready to learn while some parents are not also doing enough towards that aspect.
“To me, what constitutes the poor performance is that most students are now into information and communication technology to the extent that they prefer browsing of internet, especially on their cell phones to engage in reading,” she revealed.
She also said that most of them stuff their heads with so many songs to the extent that they would find it difficult to assimilate any subject. So, there is need, according to her for the students to be more alive to their studies while their parents monitor them.
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