129 LASU medical students fail to graduate

Written by Kunle Awosiyan, Lagos
Thursday, June 24, 2010

No fewer than 129 students of Lagos State University College of Medicine could not graduate with their mates for the 2009/2010 academic session.



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This was revealed at the induction ceremony for the sixth graduating set of doctors, on Wednesday.

According to the overall best student, Dr. Balogun Adeniyi, the college registered 159 students for medical programme but only 25 of them completed the course successfully, while 129 failed to do so.

Adeniyi, who described the programme as six years of academic imprisonment, advised his mates who could not graduate this year not to be discouraged but put in more efforts to excel in the following year.

However, the state governor, Mr. Babatunde Fashola (SAN), has described the low number of medical graduates as academic accident in the institution.

He attributed the low number of graduates to serious adherence of the college to high standard of academic performance, adding that only students who scored high grades during their 200 levels were allowed to proceed for medical programme.

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[b]The depth to which education has sunk in Nigeria is epitomised by this news which shows that only 25 out of 159 students successfully completed their medical degree at LASU. Those who have studied in the UK, USA and Canada would testify to the fact that at the end of each course or module, students are invited to anonymously assess their professors in the same manner that the students themselves would be assessed. In the developed world, e.g. UK, USA and Canada, if this number of students fails to qualify, such an outcome would never be considered a symptom of “high standard of academic performance” as Governor Fashola reportedly claims. Instead, it would be regarded as a woeful failure on the part of the academic department which itself may be axed if such a trend is not reversed. Whilst I am certainly not advocating that academically weak students who failed their examinations should be allowed to graduate, it seems absurd that 129 out of 159 students enrolled on a programme failed. This failure in my opinion is a reflection of the failure of their professors, the medical school, and the decay of Nigerian universities and the education system.[/b]