Politics of grading in Nigerian academic system

By: Kenny Ola

THE obsession with excellent certificates among Nigerians has become so increasingly overwhelming that people have lost sight of some things that deserve thorough interrogation. Upon the announcement of first-class graduates, congratulatory messages quietly flourish. Felicitations become a ritual. And energy takes an unspeakable turn, especially when such an academic triumph is “a forty-year academic record” recently shattered. This is not to excoriate the celebration of academic feats or to suggest that brilliance is not worth appreciating. The thrust of this piece is to redirect the attention of the general public to the need to fiercely interrogate some academic departments in which, according to them, denying students excellent results is considered a reputation worthy of pride and preservation. Many students are remarkably brilliant but only a few make headlines. A feature that makes the difference between these two sets of students is not their brilliance; it is their certificates. While some departments constantly celebrate excellence through their students’ brilliance, others hoard it and name it: a record, not to be broken yet. Time, in those academic departments, determines excellence, not just brilliance.

In the Nigerian context, prestige has now acquired a novel meaning beyond its usual conventional interpretation. This recent interpretation does not just overglorify public institutions; it makes instant academic gratification appear cheap and delayed academic triumphs seem deserving and worthy of celebration. According to this new trend, what you graduate with doesn’t really matter as long as where you finish from is prestigious. This newly imposed meaning has put the squeeze on many brilliant students who are ravenously desirous of excellent results. Beyond the current semantic shift in meaning, it has become a common practice in Nigeria where some prestigious institutions of learning or departments proudly derive sadistic satisfaction from deferred academic wins, thereby mistaking students’ inability to attain certain academic feats for institutional strength and misconstruing academic toughness as academic rigour.

On this premise, it is not unlikely to hear Nigerians say: a second-class lower graduate of a particular institution is a first-class graduate of another institution. This is a reality that has affected the psychology of countless Nigerians and it has become a glaring disparity between private and public institutions. Such parlance appears so powerful that where one graduates from is often presumed to matter much more than what one graduates with, an assumption that has very little prominence in international climes. The obsession does not end there; it has deeply influenced the grading system of some Nigerian institutions.

An academic announcement that declares “a shattered forty-year academic record” deserves not celebration but fierce scrutiny. Such an academic record is a troubling reflection of an academic setting where excellence is determined not by diligence, but by deliberation. It depicts an academic environment where brilliance has been compromised long before justice prevails, where students’ struggles have been deliberated whether they deserve plaudits or whether they should be repeatedly sacrificed for a supposedly academic record wrongly presumed to accumulate prestige through time and where several hopes have been consistently dashed in order to give standard to a particular department or institution. True institutional prestige does not feed on its students. It adds to their flesh. Time should not dictate academic excellence. It is the responsibility of brilliance, diligence and unwavering commitment to academic tasks. Western education is introduced to break unnecessary restraints and barriers, not to keep or romanticise them as false evidence of intellectual rigour. The tragedy is exhausting.

The implication is saddening. We now live in a world where certificates precede performance, where grades relatively determine grace and where visibility is increasingly anchored in academic transcripts. Some graduates of public institutions cannot compete with their contemporaries from private institutions, not because they are not brilliant but because prestige, in some Nigerian public institutions, is mistaken for academic grades and institutional rankings for academic transcripts.

International scholarships are initially attracted to an excellent class of degree before they eventually notice the institution that births it. This is not to undermine the prestige of any institution; it is to justify that prestige of institutions resides in their graduates’ certificates. In recent times, many doors are difficult to unlock with brilliance alone; they require excellent certificates. Many platforms are quick to discredit ingenuity that is not excellently certified. The question is not just whether a generation of students who are unable to break the jinx are academically sound. The real question is what a department hopes to gain from preserving a record at the expense of its students’ academic success. An academic department cannot boast of credibility when its standard relies not on students’ growth but on a particular academic record that aggressively remains unbroken despite its decades of teaching and research. Success is not measured by numbers of failures. Academic thoroughness is not determined by poor records of academic excellence. And regardless of how prestigious an institution might be, poor academic records reflect not just students’ inadequacy but institutional failures.

The conventional classroom is not a mere learning centre; it is a quiet laboratory established to experiment different kinds of students. It is the only avenue where the underprivileged get to display brilliance, weaponise commitment and remain consistent amid the stresses and strains that come with learning. The story appears disheartening when the very classroom built to mould lives contributes to the fall of those lives. The uncertainty becomes more toxic when the four walls believed to ensure transparency are the brains behind the despair of many lives. And the essence of education begins to dissipate when opportunities, because of poor grades, escape the grip of talented students whose only asset is their ingenuity. The classroom remains one of those places where hidden talents are discovered, where merit triumphs over influence and where potential meets purpose. It is a setting where knowledge is tested before it transmutes into relevance. Teachers or lecturers don’t just deliver content; they are charged with giving honest results about this responsibility. This act of monitoring and supervision becomes suspicious when it strengthens a particular record rather than validates the true promise of education.

Grading is not a retaliatory tool to punish students, transfer generational aggression or seek personal gains; it is a responsibility steeped in trust to discharge academic duties responsibly. When particular grades are reserved for personal or institutional reasons or when particular grades are nullified even before students take examinations, the academic integrity entrenched in the nobility of teaching and learning ceases to be functional.

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This reality seems much deeper than it might appear at the surface. And beyond its personal implications, the consequences are quite evident in pedagogy. What should simply be an honest struggle for academic excellence often descends into a struggle against an unbroken record. What should be rewarding, intellectual engagements increasingly risks becoming a battlefield where every effort to shatter a record appears futile.

This is a call on academic and administrative heads of Nigerian institutions, especially public institutions, to do thorough inspections of several academic departments regarding their past and present academic records. Scrutiny is not a lack of trust; it is a responsibility geared towards ensuring institutional welfare. For an academic department not to produce even just a first-class graduate for several decades is not academic rigour; it is institutional laxity. Nigeria needs academic institutions whose prestige fattens without feeding on its students’ academic results. We need academic departments whose standard incredibly appreciates without compromising its learners’ ingenuity. And we demand a classroom where credibility, integrity, fairness and accountability are not suspected but remain a guiding force in discharging both academic and administrative tasks.

Former students are not just graduates of an institution; they are representative members of that institution. Their wins belong, not just to them but to the institution. And their failures equally qualify as the institution’s failures. A supposedly academic record that stubbornly proves difficult to be broken will eventually get shattered someday. While the harm it might have caused innocent students remains unforgivable, the lesson it offers remains indelible: unlike certificates, knowledge remains the only academic virtue that cannot be tampered with even in the face of academic distortion.

•Ola, a communications specialist based in Lagos, writes in via [email protected]