Kaduna teachers’ competency test: The untold story

By Isah Abbas Ahmed

Recently, Kaduna State Governor was quoted saying about 21,780 out of 33,000 Kaduna State teachers failed primary four test conducted by the state government to know the ability of the teachers. Questions were drawn from different areas with only that of religious knowledge teachers set focusing on their subjects.

To be fair to both the governor and primary school teachers, I decided to keep mute until I lay my hands on the scoresheet of the competency test, which I was privileged to get last week. While going through the scoresheet, I discovered that, unlike 33,000 teachers mentioned by the governor, 34,197 (4,940 Arabic/IRK, 1,638 CRK and 27,629 other subjects) teachers actually wrote the competency test (Table 2).

As howled by many, the cut-off mark set by the Governor as pass mark did not comply with West African Standard Grading System where acceptable Credit mark starts from 50% not 75% as used by the governor (Table 1). If we take this standard grading system as the ideal situation, from the scoresheet, it can be deduced that; of the 34,197 teachers, 31,102 (91%) passed while only 3,095 (9%) failed the competency test. However, if we decide to stick to the governors cut-off mark, going by the categorization in the summary from the attached scoresheet, it can be deduced that 17,473 (51%) of the 34,197 teachers scored 70 – 100% while 16,724 (49%) failed according to him. In addition, to arrive at the number El-Rufa’i was quoted saying they failed his test, there are 5,056 teachers who scored 70 – 74% and are also categorized as failed by him.

In every sane system, we expect that whenever a test of this nature was conducted, there will be those who will pass overwhelmingly, those who will be within average and those who will fail completely. In this case, what I expected the Governor to do, while still going by his cut-off mark (75%), is to take these categories and acted thus:

1. The 12,417 teachers who scored at least 75% should be retained.

2. The 18,685 teachers who scored 50 – 74% should be subjected to extensive training and re-tested after which if they failed to improve, should be redeployed to other available places to work.

3. The 3,095 teachers who scored 0 – 49% should be redeployed or sacked as the Governor deem fit.

WRONGLY TOTALLED SCORES

After obtaining the scoresheet of Kaduna State’s controversial Competency Test, I decided to verify marks obtained by each participant starting with that of Arabic/IRK Teachers in Zaria Local Government. There are five questions whose marks are distributed thus; Question 1 carries 40 marks while Questions 2, 3, 4 and 5 carries 15 marks each. These, if totaled, will give you 100 marks.

While verifying the scoresheet, on the very first record, I discovered that the Total did not speak to the individual marks obtained for each question. That is, the person scored 38/40, 09/15, 13/15, 12/15 and 14/15 in questions 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 respectively. Applying simple arithmetic of 38+9+13+12+14 will give you total of 86% marks obtained not 72% as recorded for same person.

Following this, I decided to focus on those with low marks and to my surprise, 99.9% of their marks were wrongly computed. I then stopped at the fifth page after discovering that 45 (See table 3) out of the 161 records had this same problem and almost all of them turned out score at least 75% but were wrongly recorded to have scored less than 75% which puts them at ‘Failed” category.

With this, I will like to call on NUT officials of all the 23 LGAs to sit down and follow their scoresheet diligently and painstakingly verify the summation. This will drastically bring down the failure rate.

To Governor El-Rufai, I will like to draw your attention to this and recommend that you punish the consulting company you hired to conduct this test for making you portray our dear state bad in the eyes of the world using wrong statistics. In addition, it will be nice if you ask another firm to verify simple summation of the marks obtained in order to get correct proportions. Finally, I wish to categorically state that you owe good people of Kaduna State undiluted apology for painting us black where we are not.

Pictures of the first 5-pages of Zaria LGA Arabic/IRK Teachers scoresheet are attached for public consumption. All the 45 records I verified are indicated therein. Anybody who wish to, can do the totals to further confirm my claim.

Kaduna State still remains “Center of Learning”!