MONROVIA (AFP) – Liberia’s main
public university said on Wednesday August 28, 2013, that all 25,000 applicants
for the new academic year had failed its entrance exam, prompting the president
to describe poor education standards in the impoverished nation as a “national
emergency”.
The University of Liberia, which
educates more than half of the country’s students in the capital Monrovia, said
it had been forced to admit 1,600 failed candidates for the new term which
begins next month.
“None of the 25,000 students who sat
the test (obtained) the required points,” said university vice-president Ansu
Sonii.
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf made
an impromptu call at the university to discuss the failure, her office said in
a statement, which described the situation as “alarming” and confirmation of a
recent statement by the president that “the educational system is a mess”.
“Why are the students of the system
not performing to the standards expected? Why are they not comparative with
those in other countries?” Sirleaf demanded as she met university authorities
on Tuesday, August 27, 2013 according to the statement.
The president urged the country to
see the poor performance of the candidates as a “national emergency”, the
statement added, and called on “all Liberians, irrespective of political
background” to tackle the issue of dire standards in schools.
Sirleaf was awarded the Nobel peace
prize for her part in ending Liberia’s ruinous back-to-back civil wars in 2003,
but has been criticized for her failure to improve teaching since she took
office three years later.
She admitted that the situation was
“embarrassing” for Liberia.
“The problem is not just taking the
test and failing. The problem is where they are coming from — so we have to go
into those high schools, into those elementary schools and see what is lacking
and what we can do about it,” Sirleaf was quoted as saying in the statement.
University president Emmet A. Dennis
said the institution had lowered the pass mark to allow in 1,600 undergraduates
and postgraduates.
Liberia is still recovering from 14
years of civil war that ended in 2003 and left the west African nation in
ruins.
Widespread poverty has led to a
large proportion of parents putting their children to work rather than sending
them to school, according to various studies by the United Nations and other
organisations.
Although there are a handful of
private higher education establishments and another tiny state-run university,
in practice more than 90 percent of the country’s publicly-educated
undergraduates go to the University of Liberia.
The Liberian parliament’s education
committee chairman Bill Tuaway blamed poor teaching for the failure, the first
time in Liberia’s history that no student has passed.
“This is a clear indication that the
quality of education in Liberia is very bad. This shows how our teachers don’t
teach well,” he told reporters in Monrovia.
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