University Drop-Outs: Where Do Broken Hearts Go?

Maybe it is the CapeVars grading system. Otherwise, in a multiple choice, open book exam age, where scholarship seems to belong to the dogs, it is news that 136 students should be expelled from a university, for poor academic performance. They may have been poor indeed. Nine students were also rusticated for improper conduct relating to clashes between two rival halls, VC Naana Opoku-Agyemang recently announced.


Here in Canada, a University professor has been sacked for awarding every student an A grade in a particular course. The academic board of a High school is also investigating a teacher who gave students exam questions ahead of time, so that they could practice to score good marks. Meanwhile in England, a previously not so highly rated school has made news for consistently maintaining a phenomenal pass rate, Yahoo news reports.


At the same rate, the general impression in academia everywhere is that students of the internet age are not living up to the speed and the intelligence of the computer. Not many professors have refused to renew their tenures because students have been a disappointment, but there have been terrible reports where professors have questioned how intellectually bankrupt students gained admission to university in the first place. If a student cannot construct a meaningful sentence in English (let’s pardon their misuse of the colon and the semicolon), what use would they be to society even if we drop the pass mark to accommodate everybody? We would only be hurting their future and the fate of their countries? What would that mean for development in a country like ours?


University education is not a particularly difficult undertaking. A student does not need to be intelligent to graduate: A few marks here and there in the interim assessment tests, where teaching assistants are usually helpful, and a not so great pass in the final exam, would see you through a B+ grade point. You can afford not to attend lectures for a whole semester. Some lecturers give their students the final exam questions at the beginning of the semester. Even those fastidious professors, who wear scholarship on their sleeves, sometimes manage to give students important hints to the kind of questions they should expect. Because of high student numbers, the questions sometimes have multiple choice answers, where students could guess their way to a good pass. In the end, there are very few surprises, because the marking scheme is developed by educationists who are not unaware of the intellectual capacity of the modern student.


Yet, 136 students in CapeVars did well to count themselves out of every academic charity the university could offer. So, where would they go to mend their broken degrees? They could apply to other universities or wait for some two years to reapply to CapeVars. In our time, the choice was limited to three, but now, there are hundreds to choose from. If we had apprenticeship and work experience schemes in Ghana, these students could learn a thing or two before they sign on to another programme at university. These students are not due for national service yet, so we cannot afford to trust the education of our children into their shaky hands. So, what are they going to do before they reapply to other universities? They are not necessarily bad students because they failed. Those who didn’t fail only managed to pass. This, perhaps, is the definition of modern scholarship.



Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin, Ottawa, Canada

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