{UAH} Allan/Edmund/Gook/Pojim: Ugandan education; the erosion of quality in favour of quantity!
|
1:00 PM |
No comments |
Ugandan education; the erosion of quality in favour of quantity!
A few weeks ago UNEB released A level results and to the consternation of the Ugandan facebook twittersphere th winners of the stakes were "non traditional" schools such as Kitende etc. I did not join that debate, nor the subsequent one on school fees at the time but i will now weigh in with some thoughts!
I warn you that some people may find my opinion offensive --- but hey, whats new!
For many years it was given that a who is who of top performing students and schools had to include a handful of central region mainly church founded schools many affiliated to the old Buganda establishment in one way or another such as Buddo, Kisubi, Namagunga, Gayaza, Namilyango etc! Many of these schools are over a 100 years old!
Before Museveni came along, these schools were often kept company by regional giants such as Ombaci, Butobero, Layibi college, Tororo girls, Busoga college, Ntare, kigezi high, Bweranyangi etc. These regional giants were just as likely to have a student top the country as any of the central region schools and they ensured that the regions were not left behind in the struggle for an education. Alternatives to the top schools included Namagunga, Nabisunsa, Nsambya, Kitovu and the exam factory of Kibuli SSS! These had a decent intake to university but were not exactly considered to be the top choices and were usually a second choice.
With the advent of UPE, USE and all manner of NRM chaos, the regional schools pretty much died save for a handful in the west, education became centralised and privatised. While prior to the NRM there was only one private college worth going to, Namasagali and often for reasons other than academics, given it provided a whole lifestyle and other useful life skills rather than just churning out nerds and geeks with doubtful social skills.
The first private exam factory was St Noah on Entebbe road that was quickly followed by Standard High school Zzana which was affiliated to a one Basajabalaba also later to expand into the university business with Kampala International University! Greenhill, an offshoot of Kampala parents school founded by Mrs Wambuzi followed for the upper (educated) middle classes. The men who industrialised exam factories however was a one Muyingo and Mulindwa, who independently of each other started schools like Namugongo, Seeta, kitende and related chains of affiliated schools appealing to the midddle classes hunger for grades and status! Now there is a private school on every hill of Kampala including many "international schools" of doubtful "internationalness" I doubt that this last one is a real word but I couldn't find a better description for them!
These schools have now taken the crown for manufacturing A's and B's from the traditional old schools but what remains in dispute is the quality of his output compared to the traditional giants!
Before we talk about the quality and what evidence there maybe for and against this argument, you may notice a pattern here --- "quality" education including" exam passing factories" are all now concentrated in the central region and the regions, thanks to the NRM's shortsightedness have died!
Education and access to higher education have been privatised and are really expensive. One of the recent controversies was the fees charged by the traditional giants whose fees have traditionally never really been low, but are now considered to be exorbitant. Private schools cost even more and so called international schools --- well some quote fees in US dollars for the doubful value! In our days there was only one international school, Lincoln and hardly any Ugandan would ever even consider taking a child to it as their level of education was considered to be inferior to and irrelevant to a Ugandan child accessing higher education. If you wished to go overseas you sat your UNEB side by side with your SAT's and the GCSE, arranged privately!
As a SMACK old boy I can comfortably say that it was pretty much a given that SMACK would always be in the top ten, and even more likely the top 5 and often would be number one, a position it exchanged with Buddo, occasionally Namilyango and very often with the two female giants of Namagunga and Gayaza.
The same could be said of virtually any of the desirable professional courses at university with a weighting heavily in favour of the sciences. For a SMACK student to end up in a "flat" course, read non professional course, was considered close to death! All aspired to and often most obtained entry to medicine/pharmacy/dental surgery, engineering, law and commerce etc --- you get the picture! They were under represented in other courses. You could count on them to dominate the intake in their chosen course with often the whole class getting admitted to the course of their first choice while other schools with even higher numbers of candidates would be lucky to admit a single student to university for any course!
On my first admission to university, I was admitetd to the sciences for Physics, Chemistry and Geology. I lasted a year and changed courses the next year in a story that will be kept for another day. One of the things that convinced me I was in the wrong place was a lecturer coming upto me on my first day and telling me he hated people like me in his course because he knew if I was from SMACK, Geology couldn't possibly have been my first choice! All SMACK kids aspired for other professional courses in his opinion and they resented ending up in other departments so he preferred those who were grateful to be at university doing anything to those who were so priviledged by their background that they didnt realise just how lucky they were to be in his class! He proceeded to be obnoxious to me and my other former classmate from SMACK, who left the country at the end of the year for Europe! At the end of the year, while I had passed, I very happily told him i had taken up his advice and changed schools!
A class a few years behind me in medical school had 21 girls from Namagunga, 20% of the medical school intake for that year. There are years when SMACK or one of the other central region traditional schools achieved the same feats!
In the last decade however th cup for the largest number of A's and B's and overall straights distinctions has gone to the new schools led by muyingo's schools. Courses like law have been dominated by these students many with straight A's in 4 subjects. they have crept into the top ten, positions traditionally held by the old schools. not that the old schools have not been doing well, they have and they remain relevant but their territory had never really been invaded like this before. the occasional Namasagali, Nabisunsa or kibuli top scorer had never been a threat. One gets the feeling that the world has changed but the question remains --- do the old schools still offer a better quality education or are all A's and B's the same?
The answer appears to have been presented by Law schools around the country. In particular the spectacularly high failure rate of law school graduates in LDC. There was apparently a realisation that there was very little correlation between these very high pass rates and admission UCE grades and performance in law school. This is a part of a general complaint from other courses as well. It is also a general complaint that todays university graduate is functionally illiterate compared to those in yesteryears!
The question raised then was how did law schools manage to take the best performing students in the country and then turn them into morons --- unless they were morons in the first place, trained to pass exams like trained monkeys! One theory was that unlike the old schools were students were grounded in the core subjects required to perform well in law school, admission requirements were now weighted towards having more A's irrespective of whether they were relevant to ones chosen course so students with very little grounding in the core skills required for law school still got admitted with high marks!
Makerere university law school took matters into their own hands in 2012 with spectacular results! According to a study at MUK, there was a mismatch between UNEB high school grades and performance in law school. They concluded that A level grades were not the best single indicator of academic success in the law programs and legal practice and that poor performance was generally attributed to poor comprehension and communication skills, poor analytical skills and a lack of solid knowledge based on good understanding of the legal principles.
In the first exam held in 2012, a total of 1,367 candidates sat the pre entry exam of which only 721 achieved the pass mark of 50%, qualifying to be recommended for admission. Of these candidates 1201 were students who had recently passed their A levels, but only 586 passed with a score of at least 50%. A further analysis of the results lent credence to the idea that its not the best nor the brightest who score the highest entry marks to university with some of the best performing students in the UNEB A levels scoring the worst grades and some of the poorer performing students performing quite strongly on the specific cognitive skills that were tested.
It was also discovered that the traditional "old" schools were more likely to demonstrate a grounding in these skills compared to high performing candidates from some of the new exam driven 'factories'! Namugongo martyrs, SMACK, Gayaza high school were noted to be among the strongest candidates irrespective of UNEB grades!
One observation was that the main 'feeder' schools to the law programme in recent years such as kitende which was providing upto half of the admission to law school and Kawempe muslim performed dismally! This was despite most observers judging the exam as being 'basic and fair' and aimed at judging the candidates general knowledge, awareness of current events as well as numeracy and reasoning!
The pre entry exam covers the followin areas;
- Reading and Comprehension Skills
- Language Skills
- Numerical Skills and Logic
- General Knowledge
- Analytical Writing Skills
The pre entry exam has been continued each year despite protestations with a similar pattern --- little correlation between high school grades and ability to pass the entry exam and candidates from old 'traditional schools' consistently performing more strongly on the core skills the exam tests for while those from new private exam driven schools perform worse!
Its been noted that LDC is starting to note a difference in the quality of candidates it gets for its programme and that this is reflected in their pass rates!
In 2015, 2,254 candidates sat for the exams, with only 468 oobtaining a 50% pass mark, a failure rate of 81%!
Of the 4 best candidates students, 2 were from Gayaza High School and 2 from St. Mary's College Kisubi. A 5th student was from Kibuli SSS.
The overall pass rate was about 19% with only about 19% of high school students passing the test. Diploma holders pass rate was 20.6%, nature age entry students 44% while degree holders had the best pass rate of 57%. The top high school candidates had equivalent grades to the top mature entry candidates while the top diploma and degree holders had significantly lower top grades!
Of 1364 candidates who sat in 2013, only 997 passes with 40% failing to achieve a mark of 50%. The same pattern emerged with traditional school candidates performing more strongly in comparison to those from new exam oriented schools!
What can be devined from these results is that there is a greater emphasis on passing A levels with a top grade without paying attention to core skills required to maintain performance in law school.
While other schools have not followed suit, there are similar complaints regarding weak candidates admitted with strong A level grades that do not reflect their subsequent performance at university.
This suggests that other schools may have to follow suit with pre entry exams in order to compensate for the effect of commercialised exam oriented factories whose focus is admission to university rather than imparting the relevant core skills of Reading and Comprehension Skills, Language Skills Numerical Skills and Logic, General Knowledge and Analytical Writing Skills.
One could argue of course that this criteria is elitist and is not valid but I will leave that argument to others!
The NRM has created distortions in the education environment that have concentrated all of the "best" schools into the central region, killed the traditional regional giants that had a balancing regional and social class effect and placed access to a higher education in the hands of the highest bidder while watering down the candidates admitted to university resulting in a mediocre output!
As they say, Garbage In, Garbage Out! If I had to do it all over again, in the current environment, given the above results, I would still prefer to go to SMACK! My peers, predecessors and followers at SMACK have and continue to conquer the five continents in every field except politics which they have left to the least qualified --- the pigs, something that must be fixed! Not that I am volunteering as am never ever likely to --- ever as politics isnt my thing!
Note; If you feel that your school has been slighted, it was not the intention of this article! Ditto if you feel your school was left out!
0 comments:
Post a Comment