Poor Performance in WAEC and NECO Exams in Nigeria

Poor Performance in WAEC and NECO Exams in Nigeria Aside from long neglect of the education sector prior to President Jonathan who has put in reasonable resources into all tiers of education; educational planners in the federal and states ministries should have a look at these two challenges which I personally believe are bottle necks contributing massively in the under p[performance of our children in WAEC among other challenges:  Inability of students to concentrate, there are so many things that critically distract the students from concentrating in their readings that were not there some 20 years ago! Among them are 24/7 internet and highly exciting social networks, 24?7 music entertainment television both local and foreign, sophisticated telephone sets with a lot of time consuming entertainments and games that students would find quite difficult to disentangle from and so many other things like music competition by big corporations paying out several millions of Naira.  Students’ assessment summersault; think of this from basic seven to SS3 the student is assed based on continuous assessment exams carry about 60% while class work carries 40 marks ! this means that if a child should score 25 to 35 marks in class work it means that even with a 25% score in exam proper the student would still get the mandatory credit even though in the exam proper he or she would barely make a pass which is simply not good enough! So a child may be ‘doing well’ while in class but in external exams the child would sure fail! In the university where continuous assessments are also used it is used throughout and not abandoned at degree exams but the reverse is the case in Secondary school, the child would continue to rely on continuous assessment up till the final time only for WAEC to be based on exams only. This is a crazy summersault that is now contributing to our children poor performances. The way out, either continuous assessment is followed through to WAEC that WAEC exams would only carry60% of the mark or educational planners should as a matter of urgency jettison continuous assessment so that the student should know from day one he would be assessed by exams alone!