Do not pay registration fees for a student, tutor him instead

Sir: There are so many lessons to learn from the recent Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) saga for recording a set of another massive poor result, just as happened in 2021. What troubles me is that, instead of the society to learn from the past scenarios as antidote to the future happenings, we keep repeating the same mistake, diminishing our innate capability to adjust our state of being as humans.

Let me narrate a quick, personal story. I graduated from high school in 2020, wrote my first Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) and scored lower than what I wanted. I wanted 200 and above, but I was 12 marks below. Many of my classmates had the same issue, poor scores. I didn’t know it was because of my poor reading habit and lack of orientation that made me score that. I sat for it again the following year, and my performance became poorer. Fortunately, I later got where my mistake was, and in the long run, having read at least 70 per cent of what was required of me to reach the benchmark and attended free UTME tutorials, I not only passed the 200 I wanted but added considerable marks, and that later gave me a place in the medical school.

I attended free UTME tutorials called Bill Ward UTME Tutorials. There’s this philosophy behind it which I deeply like and forever grateful for, ‘Tutor a student and support him’, or just simply ‘Tutor him if you cannot do both, but never pay for his UTME fees’. This is not discouraging that students should be financially supported, but the emphasis should be focused more on teaching the students. By teaching them, you not only change their life forever, but you take their world to higher level.

Yearly, governors, senators, and other influential people spend millions of naira buying UTME forms for thousands of students that do not know the value, just staying at home reading nothing, and on the day of writing UTME, they flood the JAMB centres and later come out with various scores ranging from 120 to 180, et cetera. That is what those students score. To be honest, with that kind of scores, they do not get any meaningful course. They just attend university and study anything they are given. At the end of the day, they won’t see any meaningful fruit in what they are doing.  Instead of paying millions to cover their registration fees that will later yield nothing to write home about, why not use that same amount to hire a good tutor for these students? Why not use 70 per cent of this amount and prepare 30 per cent of the students?

If we really are ready for a radical change in the students’ performance, there’s an urgent need for us to focus more on tutoring them rigorously, introducing scholarly contests among them with moderate prizes as tool for encouragement, letting them understand that it is the only way to steer them forward by having experts orient them. Until then, a glimmering society whose tendency of succeeding is a stone’s throw from reality will never be produced.

Salim Yakubu Akko wrote from Gombe State.