Grades Without Knowledge: The Quiet Collapse of Nigeria’s Education Foundation
By Jerry Adesewo
For once, it is important to pause the endless churn of politics, security anxieties, and economic turbulence, and return to a problem so foundational that every other national aspiration depends on it: the integrity of learning itself. The recent advisory issued by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) to secondary school teachers, school proprietors, and parents is not just a complaint from frustrated academics; it is a warning flare about a system eating its own future.
At the heart of ASUU’s message is a troubling paradox: students brandishing excellent SSCE results—A1s and distinctions—who arrive at universities unable to defend the very grades they celebrate. This is no longer anecdotal. It has become systemic. When students with top grades in Mathematics cannot handle basic fractions, when Physics and Chemistry “distinctions” collapse under simple questions of energy conversion or chemical reactions, and when Literature and Government grades do not translate into basic conceptual understanding, something has gone terribly wrong.
This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of process, ethics, and collective responsibility.
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When Grades Replace Learning
ASUU’s intervention exposes a culture where results have become commodities and examinations are transactional. Too many schools—public and private—have reduced learning to performance metrics designed for marketing, league tables, and parental bragging rights. Students are coached not to understand, but to pass. Worse still, in some cases, they are not even allowed to fail, regardless of effort or ability.
The outcome is predictable: a generation entering higher education unprepared for independent thought, analytical reasoning, or academic discipline. Universities are forced into remedial roles they were never designed to play. Lecturers spend valuable time reteaching secondary school material, while students become frustrated, overwhelmed, and disillusioned.
ASUU’s anecdote of engineering undergraduates—sixteen of them with impressive WAEC grades—unable to cope with JS3 and SS1 arithmetic is not merely embarrassing. It is structural sabotage. These are young people set up for failure long before they stepped into the “Ivory Tower.”
Some twenty years back, a diplomat friend, HE. Mr. Akio Tanaka of the Embassy of Japan had lamented the same to my hearing, with reference to candidates for international scholarship, which most of the time, they just accept ‘blindly’, only for those candidates to get to Japan, and choose partying over learning.
The Moral Cost of “Push-Up” Education
Perhaps the most damning aspect of the crisis is what ASUU calls out explicitly: the rise of so-called “push-up” schools—institutions known less for teaching than for “helping” students secure grades. Parents, desperate for results in WAEC, NECO, or JAMB, knowingly migrate their children to these schools at the SS level. Complaints, rants, and moral outrage often follow, but the complicity is undeniable.
This is not kindness. It is cruelty disguised as care.
Last year, my WAEC-bound daughter returned home to inform me that those writing the examination had been asked to pay a certain amount of money, aside from the school fees and the examination fees already paid. When I pressed further, I was told it is a ‘Helping Fee’, as any of them who paid will be helped during the examination process – that was institutionalized malpractice, and I refused to pay.
By shielding students from the discipline of preparation, struggle, and honest assessment, adults are robbing them of resilience. The short-term victory of high grades becomes a long-term burden of academic failure, emotional stress, and loss of direction at the university level. Many of these students, unable to cope, drift into destructive subcultures—cultism, internet fraud, anti-intellectual bravado—because the system never equipped them to succeed legitimately.
A Broken Pipeline, Not a Broken Child
What ASUU makes clear—perhaps unintentionally—is that Nigeria’s education crisis is not isolated to universities. It is a pipeline failure, starting from secondary education and driven by adult decisions. Teachers are pressured to produce results. Proprietors eager to advertise success. Parents are unwilling to accept average performance. Examination malpractice thrives in the shadows of collective denial.
The result is a cruel illusion: certificates without competence, confidence without capacity, ambition without foundation.
Education, by its nature, demands patience, honesty, and discomfort. You cannot cheat your way into understanding. You cannot outsource thinking. And you cannot protect children from effort without harming them.
The Question We Must Ask Ourselves
ASUU’s most haunting question deserves repetition: “If we do this for them at secondary school level, will we do the same at university?”
The answer is already evident. Universities cannot—and should not—become extensions of examination fraud. When the scaffolding collapses, students fall. And when enough students fall, society pays the price in incompetence, cynicism, and lost potential.
My Position, Our Position
This is not a call for punishment. It is a call for the restoration of integrity.
Let students write their examinations themselves.
Let grades reflect merit.
Let failure be part of learning, not a stigma to be avoided at all costs.
Let parents choose honesty over shortcuts.
Let schools teach, not manufacture results.
Nigeria cannot build a knowledge economy on falsified foundations. We cannot demand innovation, discipline, and excellence from a generation we trained to game the system. ASUU’s message is uncomfortable because it tells the truth: we are sabotaging our children while pretending to help them.
The future does not need perfect grades.
It needs capable minds.
And that change, as ASUU rightly insists, begins with us—individually, collectively, and urgently.