Standardization is the establishment and entrenchment of good standards. Standards are acceptable conditions or rules of decisions and practices in human endeavours.
When standards are set, all active and potential stakeholders are expected to respect and adopt them.
A deviation from such paradigm, more especially downwardly, amounts to degradation.
Wherever degradation occurs, the quality of relative products becomes questionable because they always measure below par!
There has been flagrant degradation of standards in Nigeria’s academic system. And such has continued to churn out hurds of unqualified graduates.
Things do not occur without causes. What are the major causes of this menace?
There are three cardinal causes, namely corruption, poor reading culture and manipulative politics.
Corruption has bedeviled almost all the Nigerian institutions. The institutions of teaching and learning are not exempted.
In consequence, certificate racketeering has become a culture, as he who pays the piper dictates the tune.
Rich dullards and their wards now have their field day. They could easily bribe those in the positions to award academic certificates.
This reality has entrenched de spirited reading culture among students. Instead of reading their books, they resort to daily phone pressing and Facebook browsing.
When you leave the book, the book will also leave you. This is an old age maxim whose truth can hardly be negated.
Students now refuse to study their books, but hope to graduate eventually through ‘sorting’ and other related gratification.
The almighty Nigerian politics and its apostles have contributed lots of quotas to this present degradation.
The ministry of education, the university authorities and examination handling bodies can always be politically manipulated.
In consequence, cutoff marks on courses keep going down on yearly basis to accommodate the entrenched culture of academic mediocrity!
All sorts of methods are employed to sit for examinations to ensure that malpractices prevail eventually.
For students intending to enter the university to score up to two hundred marks in the stipulated four subjects calls for feasting and celebration.
Those who could score from two and fifty marks and above are regarded as academic lords.
After each episode of JAMB examination, parents still pay much money to buy admission for their wards who want to enter the university.
Go into Nigerian universities and listen to students’ language of communication; it is nothing but pidgin English!
Nigerian university undergraduates can hardly speak or write correct English language.
That is the litmus test of the fallen standards in Nigerian academics. What has caused it, remember: corruption, poor reading culture and manipulative politics!