When Inability to Pass Becomes Ability and License to Teach -By Abdulkadir Salaudeen

I have written several columns on JAMB’s cut-off marks for admission seekers into Nigeria’s higher institutions recently. In those columns, I lamented the lowering of the admission bar to a ridiculous minimum.

While Professor Ishaq Oloyode, who just stepped down as JAMB registrar, has many achievements to his credit—especially the purge and the massive reform—one disturbing policy that detracts from his record was the lowering of admission requirements.

Before assuming office, someone gave the new, young JAMB registrar, Professor Segun Aina, an assignment: bring back scholarship to the examination body by making 200 the minimum score.

I have argued countless times on this page that JAMB’s ridiculously low cut-off marks encourage laziness and kill diligence among students. JAMB will always argue that it does not fix cut-off marks. Is JAMB a robot that is teleguided?

Four years ago, in a piece titled: “JAMB Should Make ‘Zero’ The Minimum Cut-off Mark For Admission Into Nigerian University,” I wrote: “JAMB always tries to vindicate itself that it doesn’t fix cut-off marks for tertiary institutions. JAMB could be right but who fixes it? JAMB should have taken it upon itself to defend its decision if the low pegging makes any sense. Its explanation that it does not fix cut-off marks sounds, to me, like a deliberate acknowledgment of the fact that the minimum scores are indeed ridiculous.”

The piece was a reaction to JAMB beating down the pass mark to 140. When I wrote it, I sarcastically asked JAMB to fix zero as the cut-off mark. I wrote: “JAMB may wish to make zero the minimum cut-off score for admission into our tertiary institutions. The elementary truth is that 140 out of 400 (35%) or 0 out of 400 (0%) falls within the bracket of failure. We call it F9.”

Four years later, zero is now the cut-off mark—not for all courses, but for the most important one. The mother, the foundation, and the fountain of all courses.

If you are still wondering which course that is, it is probably because we have made it a habit to undervalue our primary and secondary school teachers. The course is Education. For candidates who choose to study education in Colleges of Education, JAMB has been waived. Not because they will sit for a different, more rigorous test, but because their inability to pass JAMB has starved our schools of the teachers they need to teach our kids.

Yes, we were told, JAMB has become a barrier to studying Education. We were told: “The waiver is a major step towards reducing entry barriers and widening access to teacher education, particularly for students in underserved communities where Colleges of Education can serve as centres of opportunity and development.”

I am still struggling to make sense of the above quote. Some national dailies attribute it to Dr. Angela Ajala, the Executive Secretary of the National Commission for Colleges of Education.

This is not reducing entry barrier as she said. Nothing is reduced. “Reduction” is not the word; the word is “removal.” In my article titled “Affirmative action or removing the bar? a critique of admission requirements,” I asked if the government was not actually removing the bar in the name of affirmative action through its discriminatory admission cut-off marks. I was right in my suspicion. The bar has now been removed.

In the article, published in Turkey by the Journal of Social and Educational Research , 2024, 3(1), I wrote in its introduction: “The education sector remains a critical sector in any society. A society that neglects it does so at its peril. It is the force that drives nations to great heights. A state’s commitment to education is evidence of its commitment to development and progress. A nation retrogresses when it neglects education or shows little commitment to it.” Unfortunately, the Nigerian government thinks otherwise.

On the suspicion that those who decided to divorce scholarship from Nigeria’s education system might be alone, they try to convince themselves by saying: “The reform is not a lowering of standards. It is a widening of the door, with structure still standing at the gate.”

Removing a qualifying exam like JAMB without substituting it with a more rigorous one is considered a reform? Is that a reform or a deformity? Who hoards common sense in this country until nonsense starts making sense to us? Must every Nigerian be a graduate?

I don’t know if this happens elsewhere. As far as I know, it is only in Nigeria that the more people fail exams, the more schools are built. Could it be that there is a symbiotic relationship between failure and higher education, because we keep building more schools as people fail? Or could it be a symptom that the country itself is a failure?  I expressed this irony two years ago in a Daily Trust article titled “UTME: The more Nigerians fail, the more universities are established.”

The government should have addressed the root causes of failure in our basic and secondary schools — negligence, underfunding, and miserable salaries paid to teachers, among others. After all, the government cannot feign ignorance about why candidates fail UTME and why JAMB suddenly became a “barrier.” JAMB was never a barrier. Until it started lowering the bar to a ridiculous minimum. JAMB had always been the filter that separated the grain from the chaff. The body has now been wrested from that role.

The Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, has been vindicated. This union has been engaging the government to point out the unreasonableness of proliferating higher institutions in the country. Now we are facing the reality. Not just colleges of education and polytechnics — we now have many universities with few students because only a few candidates pass UTME. Those universities did not need to be established in the first place. But because the government likes to quantify achievements that are not achievements in the real sense, it keeps proliferating universities while feeder schools are in shambles. (By feeder schools, I mean secondary schools). To keep these universities open, JAMB has to make entry requirements so low that candidates do not need to pass. They only need to sit for the examination.

As stated in the new policy, candidates seeking admission into Colleges of Education would still need to register for JAMB, but only as a formality. I am still watching, waiting for an official pronouncement from the government that schooling is a scam. There are indications that this is how the government sees education in Nigeria. It would not be surprising, since many of our rulers “govern” us with either controversial or forged certificates.

We are toying with our future when people who could not pass any exam are trained to train our kids. When teachers become synonymous with failure, I don’t know how else to define a failed generation.

Let me conclude with a quote from an article written by Adam Muhammad and one Abdulkadir Salaudeen. It was published last year in the Zaria Journal of Educational Studies, titled “The ‘Education is a Scam’ Debate in Nigeria: A Critical Discourse Analysis”: “This paper concludes that education is not a scam. However, within the Nigerian context, one would be arguing against reality to say education is not a scam, due to the government’s disjointed education policies and the non-implementation of laudable ones. This makes education ridiculous and turns it into a ridiculed pathway to success.”

Let’s see if this policy does not turn schooling into a complete scam. Let’s see if does not turn our schools to just getting in to get a certificate. May we be healed.

Abdulkadir Salaudeen

salahuddeenabdulkadir@gmail.com