How Credible is your Certificate for Employment? By Nwangwu Augustus

The academic certificate is a document certifying that the bearer has gone through a programme of tutelage or training in a specified institution or establishment, formally or informally, and acquired specific skills or knowledge and able to perform specific tasks.

It is however the responsibility of the employer to ascertain whether the skills possessed by the bearer of the certificate meet the demands of the job.

In some circumstances, the skills that have been acquired may just be adequate for the job position as is the case with teachers whose training incorporates supervised teaching practices ensuring that the graduates are ready to begin working without the need for additional tutoring or apprenticeship. This is also the case with some other professional courses such as engineering and medicine.

In many other cases however, the training received may be of a more general nature and may have no direct bearing on the job being sought. It may therefore be necessary that the applicant undergoes additional training before acquiring sufficient competence to manage the job desired. The above is the best case scenario where the candidates possess the skills or knowledge in consonance with their certificates.

In many instances, the certificate bearer does not possess the skills or knowledge suggested by the certificate, notwithstanding the authenticity of the document in question. A well publicised case was the dismissal of three graduates of the Enugu State University of Science and Technology (ESUT) from the National Youth Service Corps scheme for performing abysmally below expectations, including inability to read and write.

Surprisingly, the NUC did not take any action against the university so indicted. In another instance during an organised assessment of the quality of teachers in Kwara State in 2008, only one out of 2,628 graduates attained the pass mark in a primary four level competency test.

I lay the blame for this poor performance squarely at the doors of the universities that award the bogus certificates to candidates who can scarcely read or write.

But how could this happens despite the multiple efforts aimed at assuring the quality of the products of such institutions? The NUC is primarily responsible for accreditation of universities to ensure adequate facilities, competent staff and conducive environment. The NUC also sets the minimum academic standard in terms of curriculum and graduation requirements.

In practice however, most Nigerian universities operate under conditions that are far from conducive!

The university senate is responsible for implementing these regulations to maintain academic standards within the institution. But at every step, this regulatory process is manipulated to attain myopic goals without consideration for the overall quality of the products. Academic semesters are truncated, sometimes reducing the learning period by half creating a huge gap in what ought to have been taught and what is actually taught.

Contrary to NUC regulations, some universities have introduced the waiver clause which allows candidates to graduate without passing all prescribed courses. Under the waiver regime, any two courses may be waived including core courses in areas of specialisation. Some departments we learnt have further extrapolated this illegal senate bylaw through some spurious interpretation to allow candidates with five failed courses to graduate.

Other senate bylaws which are clearly at variance with the NUC regulations are regularly implemented to artificially boost the quality of university graduates.

These include using the best 120 out of a total of about 145 credit units registered to compute degree results while excluding failed attempts at the same time.

But all these pale into insignificance, given the largely unregulated powers of the individual course lecturers to influence the apparent performance of the students in the course examinations. In these days of unprecedented decline in both character and learning in the rank and file of the academic staff of Nigerian universities, the disparity between the expected and actual knowledge is not surprising. Students who can hardly read and write are awarded pass grades by unscrupulous academic staff for a reward. Even senior academic staffers often apply unrelenting pressure on the junior ones to upgrade results for very poor candidates who ought not to be in the system in the first place.

Ultimately, only a few individuals, who cannot afford what it takes, end up with a fail degree at the end of their studies.

Blatant violations of NUC regulations by university administrations and failure to checkmate examination malpractice are responsible for the low quality of Nigerian university graduates.

The saddest aspect of all these is that the NUC appears unable to check these administrative malpractices and incompetence, leaving the employers of labour the unenviable task of sifting through the large number of unqualified graduates to find the few competent ones. The responsibility now rests squarely with the employers to design appropriate means of selecting candidates who can both read and write, and possess the minimum skills required to perform on the job in their respective establishments.

UNIZIKMATA.COM

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