NEWS TOWER: A Letter from a Mathematics Teacher to WAEC

Students writing examinations.

As a teacher, I have watched unsavoury trends over time, which have pushed me to the wall and coerced me to speak up. It is a trend within the external examination authorities, the West African Examination Council, WAEC, as it pertains to mathematics, which I happen to teach.

So much lies have often been told of how kids of these days hate to read their books. Parents often hide behind these and claim that during their own time, they were serious students. This lie will serve as a pedestal for boastful lies from some parents. I finished secondary school in the mid-eighties. Even then, the level of hard-work among students wasn’t anywhere different from what it is now. The proportion of serious students today is the same as it was back then. It could even be better now because we now have competitions in private schools that have turned up brighter students than in the past. It is the reason why everyone wants to educate his child in a private school.

I was in the sciences. Mathematics is crucial to the understanding of the sciences. As I mentioned in a preceding paragraph, only a few students were serious during our time. Out of about thirty students of my class back in the mid-eighties, there were only six that passed mathematics with credits or higher grades. That makes it 20% of the students. Those students were hard-working not because their parents pushed them to be hard-working, but because they had a certain degree of maturity that agitated and kept their conscience awake.

On any day, if you pick any number of students, the same percentage will have the conscience to do what is right at that age without someone compelling them to do so. A certain percentage tidied up their lives by re-writing WAEC some years later, with added maturity.

If you ask yourself sincerely, how many persons studied hard during your set, you are going to come up with a “not many” answer.

So, why is it that, these days, even when students are well-taught, a whole set would fail the external mathematics examination?

What Ii will be writing in the following paragraphs is my opinion. It is left for readers to agree with me or not. The answers I get will either vindicate or incriminate me. Recently, some science competitions have emerged to bring excellent students who rewarded with scholarships. Notable among these are the Olympiad, Cowbell and Insterswitch competitions. What has become clear is that WAEC is getting influenced by these competitions that are supposed to bring out geniuses. A thousand would write the examination, but only a few will come out with pass marks. The trend is creating frustration among hard-working students, their teachers and hurting the nation.

One of the secrets of why I was successful in secondary school was the revision of past question papers from WAEC. I looked at the question papers to see what we had covered that I could answer, but also what we have covered that I couldn’t answer. I made revisions of what I had learned that I couldn’t answer. I went on to study topics that we hadn’t covered, notable among them were Longitude and Latitude, which I taught myself successfully and now teach my students. Back then, when you pick a question paper, even as a student, you could see that you could pass the examination. I later went to a university and studied in the natural sciences, bagging a first degree as far back as 1992. With all the experience that followed in the more the three decades since my secondary school, I get scared when I pick up a Mathematics question paper to revise with my students today. That is how I learned that something is wrong with the pattern of WAEC mathematics tests these days.

My students, currently writing the WAEC examination in August due to the Corona Virus pandemic, have already written mathematics on 17th August. After the paper, my best students came out looking disappointed. They are students that I had expected to do me proud. Some of them know Mathematics more than I knew it when I was in secondary school. One of these students had topped Plateau State in a competition that is organized by the Presidency to award a federal scholarship. I became heartbroken, not knowing what else to do, going by the level of hard work we had put in and the number of bright students we were lucky to have in the set. The outcome: I am losing interest in the profession, and the students are becoming frustrated.

It is why I am writing this, to call the attention of WAEC to a pattern of questions in recent years that requires students to struggle to find “expo” because they feel that they cannot pass mathematics examinations on their own.

Only parents who loved and understood mathematics during their time can understand my position. To corroborate my claim, you have to pick questions of the last decade, for instance, to compare with what you had written during your time if you had written any time before 2000.

We must avoid this national disaster.