Minister of Education Announces Cancellation of Multiple Common Entrance Examinations

Minister of Education Announces Cancellation of Multiple Common Entrance Examinations

In a bid to overhaul the education sector, Nigeria’s federal government has announced the cancellation of interview tests for the National Common Entrance Examination, NCEE, into Federal Government Colleges.

This announcement was made by the Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu through a statement issued in Abuja on Monday, and is to take effect from the 2017/2018 academic year.

The statement which was signed by the Deputy Director, Press, Bem Goong, explained the move stating that multiple entrance examinations imposed unfair financial burdens on parents and guardians and often times did not mean the best students got admission into these schools.

According to Vanguard, the statement in part reads:

“The second test is an unnecessary additional financial burden on parents/guardians. The era of multiple examinations attracting prohibitive fees cannot be accommodated by the Buhari administration, especially against the backdrop of government’s determination to increase access to education as a platform for breaking the cycle of poverty.”

The minister advised the examination board,-NECO, to instead, strengthen its processes to achieve credible and quality examination with the first test. This is in keeping with Dr Oby Ezekwesili’s plea for an urgent need to overhaul the education sector to avoid total collapse.  The former Minister of Education made this known while speaking in Abuja at the 2016 Nigerian Education Innovation Summit organised by Education Partnership Centre, EPC.

“Systems are very important; when you have system, then you have a higher probability of good outcomes. ‘’If your systems are not functional, then you would need to overhaul them, because disfunctional systems, can’t give you any good outcome. “When we talk about education, you have to look at it as a system that has input, output, outcome and your measurement of the impact that the outcome really stand for. ‘’When you do that, you will realise that we have been in serious trouble since the time that I was even Minister of Education.”

This is another giant move in the education sector as the federal government earlier announced the ban on Post-UTME effective from  the 2016/2017 academic session.