"Liberia Has Education Problem": How 24,000 Students Failed University Entrance Exams

Education

Monrovia, Liberia -- The administration of the University of Liberia, the oldest degree-granting school in West Africa, has disclosed that no student passed in the entrance and placement examinations.
Recently, the University of Liberia administered entrance exams to more than 24,000 students.
According to the head of UL Relations, Dr. S. Momolu Getaweh, no student earned the scores of 50 percent in Math and 70 percent in English which have been set as passing scores for the undergraduate examinations.
Similarly, the administration of the University of Liberia also said no candidate who sat for the graduate programs for the Law School and School of Pharmacy exams scored 70 percent.
The UL administration said, holding these results constant, no candidate would have otherwise been admitted to the university for academic 2013/14 in the above programs.
Considering the massive failures, the UL administration said two separate meetings were held to find a way out. As a result of the meetings, the UL Senate reviewed several other scenarios below the benchmarks and recommended for the admission of 1,626 candidates who scored either at least 40 percent in Math and 50 percent in English in the undergraduate program.
However, it said total hours of academic work for the first semester of 2013/14 shall not exceed nine hours a week, adding "the students must pass the transitional courses within two semesters, if they wish to continue at the university."
The statement said upon admission to the university, the rules governing poor academic performance shall apply, noting that these rules shall be provided to the candidates during the matriculation exercises following registration for first semester 2013/14.
Dr. Getaweh said the results of the entrance clearly indicate that Liberia's educational system still has a problem.
Meanwhile, the Student Representative to the Student Council Alhadji Kromah says he sees recent entrance examination results of the University of Liberia as frustrating and disappointing because the University allowed only two persons to correct the exam paper.
"You cannot have two persons correcting over 23,000 papers in less than one month," Kromah said.
Kromah says the selection of the 1, 626 students for remedial admission who equally failed with the rest of the students who sat the exams is a question that the administration needs to answer.
"They [UL Administration] told us all the students failed. How did they configured one thousand students to be admitted?" Kromah wondered. "Authority at the University has handpicked people from their offices, nieces and nephews to make them regular students."
He said, zero entry is not a benchmark that should be implored by the University to reduce the number of enrollment. "You cannot create an impression here like Liberian students are not learning anything just to reduce the enrollment," Kromah said.
Last year 2012/2013, the University of Liberia admitted nearly 7,500 candidates in the Undergraduate programs because the criteria used for those admissions were quite different from this year. The scores of 49% and 33% for English and Mathematics were used as the basis for passing in previous year.
The president of the Cape Mount University of Liberia Student Association Blessing Rogers said the University should not register more students when they [UL authorities] are aware that there is an issue of the limited capacity at the university.
"For somebody to tell me that all the students failed the University needs to give the Liberian people justifiable reasons," Rogers said.