Stakeholders at the just concluded presidential summit on education have asked the Federal Government to re-introduce the Higher School Certificate (HSC) programme without further delay.
This, according to them, has become necessary in order to improve the quality of students who are admitted to the nation’s tertiary institutions because the input is directly related to the output.
The stakeholders, who comprised top officials of parastatals under the Federal and State Ministries of Education, heads of tertiary institutions, academics, commissioners of education from all the 36 states of federation, as well as traditional rulers, said universities had better quality of students when the HSC programme was in existence, adding that the quality of many students in the universities is too poor.
This decision was reached by the committee which deliberated on ways of resolving the myriad of problems besetting the tertiary education sub-sector.
The committee also noted the disparity between the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination results of many candidates and the post-UTME.
According to the committee, it is inexplicable for a candidate to score high mark in UTME only for the same candidate to score abysmally low mark in the post-UTME, adding this has called for greater involvement of tertiary institutions in the admission process.
The committee further stressed the need to make the certificates issued by the tertiary institutions more sacrosanct as many people have got to high positions with fake certificates, reiterating that degrees and certificates should be awarded to attract ingenuity and not merely by recycling data.
The committee also called for strict adherence to rules and regulations guiding the establishment of tertiary institutions.
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