Highly prized as the university certification known as Second Class Upper division or 2:1 is, in recent years it has fast become a commodity in the hands of many average graduates.
Recent job aptitude tests, such as the one held last week at the Lagos Trade Fair Complex, where about 800,000 graduates showed up, seemed to have made common this cherished rank.
I have heard about the desperation that trails the quest for a 2:1 grade.
Besides honest studying and passing of exams, there are tales of students attending Friday vigils, so that God will touch their unbelieving lecturers to score them with good grades! Others have more ingenious, or I daresay, ignoble, ways of graduating with a 2:1.
Twenty years ago and further, students knew their different levels, and by their performances ensured the relative sense of justice school ranking gave students. But not today.
From the humble position of a newsroom deskman I had underestimated the daring nature of today’s undergraduate until I became a first-hander, not too long ago, to a student’s desperation. A gentle knock hit my door, and in strolled this not too familiar Yellow Pawpaw. In her provocative dressing, her well-sculptured anterior extremities popped out so menacingly as if their destination was my face! “Good evening sir, I’m your student”. “Okay...” “I just came from Dubai and brought you these,” raising two bags of assorted gifts. Another pause, and then the bomb! “Sir, your course is holding me down; I want you to favour me in your course so that I can graduate with 2:1.” As I sat petrified by the effrontery of this irreverent creature, my mind juggled between aesthetic contemplation and moral probity. Are the dangling mammaries real or silicon-enhanced? Is the dorsal protuberance G-stringed or bare? Too many questions. Or am I committing adultery in mind?
Yet, this is not the reason for the marginalization of 2:1 degrees. There are systemic loopholes that create many of such scenarios. Theoretically, university education should provide the intellectual and moral drivers of an entire generation, and so in depth knowledge, rigorous intellectual and cultural exposure as well as the leverage provided by the university environment facilitated the exercise of freedom, prepared students for the generational challenges.
The truth, today, is that university education tends to be superficial. A young man or lady is admitted into school with a baggage of superstitions, blind positions and encumbrances to civility, and upon graduation he is still no different from the untutored artisan he left behind in his neighbourhood. And this seems to be a trend the world over, as experts observe.
Tim Birkhead, a UK professor of behaviour and evolution, writing of today’s university education, observes that: “At school, and increasingly at university, the emphasis is primarily on facts and communication ability - the ability to recall information - and, to a lesser extent, on how to write and speak. There is hardly any weight at all given to how to think”.
Despite this downward spiral, students must graduate, and they must graduate following the traditional university student ranking, irrespective of performance, thus allowing weaker students to obtain 2:1s and even become teachers to perpetuate the retrogression.
Employers, taking a cue from tertiary institutions, have amplified this tradition of student ranking by working with what the universities provide. The impression given is that the owner of a 2:1 degree is equipped to face the challenges of today’s complex society. In this way, they also encourage the glut that has made the 2:1 degree a mere decoration of the recipient’s ego.
My Alaba Market friend, who graduated with a Second Class Upper degree from ‘the University of Lagos State’, knew what he was saying, when he proudly declared in his stuttering guttural voice: “Look at you, what is 2:1? If you are serious you can get it the way you get junk from Jankara market.” While we may argue about what he meant by ‘serious’, the likes of Yellow Pawpaw prove him right on Jankarisation.
I have seen brilliant students who have been disadvantaged by the certification in their kitty. I know of many students with Second Class Lower degrees, or even Third Class degree who have turned out to be exceptional managers and administrators, through out-of-the-curriculum education. The problem now is, how do human resources experts sift out good thinkers from ‘good’ university material. There has to be some way.
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