Educating CSEC grads at UG remains a huge challenge

Aug 11, 2012 Letters

Dear Editor,

KN should be commended for giving frequent attention to the issue of higher education in Guyana. With that thought in mind, I read the first three paragraphs of your editorial “Higher Education” (KN of 10th August) with immense interest as they gave the impression that the entire editorial intended to address the huge challenges surrounding the admission of CSEC graduates into the University of Guyana.
Unfortunately, the editorial digressed into rehashing the same arguments about the importance of research made in recent KN editorials. More than rehashing, the editorial could also be accused of peddling a few inaccuracies. It remains wrong, for instance, to suggest there is a dearth or absence of research at the university. And it is also wrong to assert that academic staff is evaluated mainly on teaching hours. The complaint, in fact, from some staff has been that research is given too much weight in staff evaluation and too little credit is given to the strenuous effort made in the faculties to deliver quality graduates.
On the research matter, I have recently in these very columns directed your attention to the annual university research day where research on a wide spectrum of topics is presented. I now draw your attention to a similar conference this week organized by the Faculty of Health Sciences. We need not quibble about the relative importance of social issues (which KN seems to favour) as compared to health issues or, for that matter, environmental or engineering issues. All are critical for national development.
I wish to move the topic away from research, as the editorial does not require additional responses to those I have already offered in your columns. Instead, I wish to dwell on the more difficult issue raised in your editorial, which is the admission policy of the university that allows entry of CSEC graduates, many with as little as five subjects. The editorial is correct in pointing out two things: the extreme burden this policy places on the university’s resources and, secondly, the fact that the CAPE regime forces students to operate at a strikingly higher level than CSEC not only in terms of their ability to do research but also to apply and integrate knowledge. Not surprisingly, CAPE students fare better at UG.
The university, however, has long accepted students with only CSEC, too many of whom are underprepared intellectually and mentally. While a good case could be made for this policy to remain relatively intact, there has not been enough debate unfortunately both nationally and within the campus on effective strategies to get these young students up to university speed. Individual faculties continue to try their own approaches, but one cannot point to a set of general guidelines on, say, course design that are based maybe on best practices, teaching experience or research findings to deal with this student preparation gap. The Faculty of Technology (and, I am sure, others), for example, favours and has tried pre-university courses, smaller class size, tutorials and responsive course outlines. But success has been elusive. Failure rates remain too high at UG and rightly constitute a foremost concern among staff and administration on the campus.
In the search for solutions, however, one encounters a debilitating and almost insurmountable hurdle. It concerns the young student’s attitude to his/her own education and advancement. Call it the self-motivation deficit. In the faculty with which I am most familiar, the most revealing behaviors and attitudes that highlight the self-motivation deficit are the view of failure by many students as a petty matter and their lack of desire to exploit easily available opportunities and resources to lift their performance (such as attending class tutorials, using the library, consulting with lecturers, and making use of the massive amount of educational material available online). Is this attitude due to a lack of maturity in our teenagers? Are secondary schools neglecting to instill in students self-discipline and desire for success? Are parents equipped to play a role? What can the university do to develop affective abilities in students (attitude, values, appreciations, motivations, etc) in addition to cognitive ones?
Of all the performance challenges facing the university, the task of converting the playful teenager with CSEC passes into an effective engineer, social scientist, or agriculturist must be at the top of the list.
Sherwood Lowe

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Educating CSEC grads at UG remains a huge challenge

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