Free Education Caused Mass Failure in WAEC

It is no longer news that about 70 per cent of candidates who sat for the 2014 May/June Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination (SSCE) conducted by the West African Examination Council (WAEC) failed the exam.

Many factors have also been identified to be responsible for this embarrassing outing which has become a norm in the recent years. But no one until now has pointed the fact that the students’ poor performance, especially in external exams could be linked to the free education enjoyed by them.

Different reactions and opinions were sampled;

A Lagos-based principal, who preferred anonymity, said the love for internet and browsing has prevented many students from taking their studies very seriously and that many parents are not also bothered to monitor activities of their children after school hours.

“Even many parents do not care whether their children get to school or not and in a home where such is the order of the day, parents should not be expected to visit their children in schools. And all this is just because they don’t pay school fees and neither do they pay exam fees any longer”, he said.

The educationist, who is of the opinion that students should begin to pay at least WAEC fees except those from extremely poor homes, said it was only through such that many of them and their parents would sit tight.

Mr. Abiodun Lawal, a teacher with a public school in Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State also believes that students’ failure is their own making.

According to him, the work of the teacher is to teach well in class and to cover syllabus and once these are done; the rest is for the students. “You can only take horse to a river you cannot force it to drink water.

That is the perfect situation between teachers and students in this respect,” he stressed.

Lawal noted that records have shown that the poor attitude of both the students and their parents to standard increased with the introduction of free education policy under this dispensation and the payment of students’ WAEC fees by various state governments.

He therefore advised that government should either stop paying the WAEC exam fees or share the money with the students’ parents to enhance performance.