The Proliferation Of First Class Degrees In Nigeria's Private Universities

The article, “First Class honours: Kini big deal?” by Abimbola Adelakun published on the back page of The PUNCH of Thursday, March 10, 2016 refers. The standard and quality of academic programme in universities the world over are NOT determined or measured by the number of first class graduates a university churns out but by the quantity and quality of research it conducts. The quality of research executed by a university is in turn measured by the number of journal articles published by its staff in core journals. There are standard yardsticks (bibliometric, webometric, etc) for determining what a core journal is. The craze to spew out large numbers of first class graduands
by Nigerian private universities is a ploy to fool the undiscerning public as to what constitutes a quality university and a marketing gimmick to attract large numbers of applicants.

This is one consequence of the commodification of education; where education is converted to a commodity purchasable by the rich few. Like air, education is invaluable, it should not be marketed with price tags. With exorbitant price tags on its wares, private universities must look for a way of convincing its customers that they are offering quality products. It is a dishonest way to confuse or bait the public with the number of first class certificates as an index of quality or a bait to attract applicants.

The data given by Adelakun on the percentage composition of first class graduates in some selected public and private universities in the past one year is very instructive. It is worth taking more than a cursory look at the data. The mean for the public universities is 1.4 per cent for last year and for the private university it is 7.13 per cent. I have restrained myself from subjecting this data to inferential statistical test (e.g. t-test) to ascertain if the two sets of data are from the same population; that is, to see if they are statistically significantly different or not. But the deviation of the two means from each other (5.73 per cent) is worth assuming that they are significantly different.

Traditionally, a first class degree is indicated in the holder as a genius or something close to that. Given the fact that these graduates were drawn from the Nigerian society and within this context, do we honestly believe that about 7.13 per cent of the Nigerian populace are geniuses? Impossible. In those days, in fact up to the late 1980s, the West African Examinations Council used to categorise its certificates into Distinction, Division 1, Division 2, etc. Distinction grades, the equivalent of First class, were scarcely awarded. You could scarcely see any school which could produce two distinctions in a year-class of say 100 candidates over a whole lifespan of such a school. Distinction grades set out the student as a genius; since the preponderance of genius in our open society is not lavishly distributed in the population; so Distinctions in our schools had to reflect the population distribution of geniuses in the society.

Today, when private universities record a whopping 7.13 per cent of First Class among their graduands, do they realise that is at variance with the population structure? Put it simply, there is no population in the world where the percentage composition of genius is so high. There is no scientifically acceptable explanation for the high percentage composition of First class in these universities.

Geniuses are borne not made. Ayodele Daniel Dada (the student who broke record in the University of Lagos by scoring 5.0 Cumulative Grade Point Average CGPA) did not wake up one morning to score those straight As. We are told that his UTME score was so high that his result was withheld. Consequently, he had to go through diploma course. Which of these so-called First Class students from our private universities scored equivalent of straight As in their secondary school exams, and which of them scored anything close to 280 in their UTME? I doubt the honest ability of our private universities to transmogrify ordinary students with ordinary SSCE and banal UTME results into overnight intellectual superstars.

Source: Punch