Ajaokuta (Kogi) – An educationist, Mr Chucks Akunabu, has attributed mass failure and seizure recorded in the 2016 May/June West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) to poor reading culture among students.
Akunaba said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Ajaokuta on Saturday.
According to him, ICT-facilitated mobile phones and the social media combine to erode the reading culture among children and even adults.
He noted that as a result of these, students now indulged in examination malpractices which led to mass failure in public and school examinations.
Akunaba, the proprietor of Longevity Secondary School, Ajaokuta, also said ministries of education were checking the proliferation of what he described as “mushroom schools’’.
He also observed that some parents often encouraged examination malpractices to ensure that their children and wards passed public examinations at all costs.
Akunaba expressed regret that Nigeria was living under past glory and could no longer boast of producing great minds and intellectuals like Prof. Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, among others.
He, therefore, urged government at all levels and stakeholders in the sector to wade into issue of mass failure in public examinations.
He observed that there had been steady improvement in the percentage of students that obtained five credits and above between 2014 and 2016.
He insisted that more efforts should be made to improve on students’ reading culture to limit examination malpractices.(NAN)
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