Bridging the gap between academic intelligence and the intelligence required at the job market has become the prime focus area in all public discourse and the need for stakeholders to help salvage the situation has assumed inevitable path.

There are several crucial mishaps underpinning our current academic design, giving it a false sense of realism.

Aside the consistent call on stakeholders to review the over-aged educational curriculum, there are several critical considerations we need to look at as a country to situate our academic enterprise to achieve the results intended for the introduction of university education in Ghana because the current designation is not only a failure but lazy and empty.

In the past we have had a lot of discussions which all sought to lay the blame of this systemic academic failure at the doorsteps of design and curriculum developers and others at the helm of affairs, but it’s time we shifted our focus a little in our search for this ugly monster ravaging our academic system.

Let’s move to various universities’ classrooms and begin to interrogate what actually happens there.

We are embarking on this search because of the recent surge in unemployed graduates choking the system, our city streets have been transformed into a beehive of an activity, with the youth marauding and gallivanting In hopelessness everywhere with no assurance of any redemptive alternatives.

Some of these graduates, for the want of a better word, despite the so called first class accolades from their respective universities, are unemployable thus various firms and corporations prefer to retain the tired-brains due for retirement at the expense of fresh graduates. This is the severity of the situation we have at hand.

What kind of impacts are the universities making on the academic development of the youth or is the system designed just for students to walk through for papers (certificate)?

University education in Ghana now appears like students only pay fees in exchange for certificates, no transfer of intellect, development is null, knowledge acquisition is null. This is the reality.

In other jurisdictions where students are trained to use their brains to solve critical situations and devise alternatives for solving critical puzzles in the field of engineering, medicine, nursing, InfoTech and others through in-depth research work which requires active reading and review of various academic literature, that is not the case in our situation. Lecturers give notes to students and expect them to chew the notes verbatim and reproduce same during exams as if their students are ruminants.

In the classrooms of various universities across the country, some lecturers are indeed killing the academic prospects in students aspiring to go higher on the academic ladder because there isn’t any proper oversight responsibility in place to check what lecturers do, so any exercise of bad academic discretion on the part of these lecturers will leave an overwhelming damming consequences on these poor students.

The sag in supervision (under the impression that a lecturer knows it all) afford them the luxury to do stuffs that frustrate learning, knowledge sieving and acquisition.



Isn’t it amazing that the lecture notes which was given to 2010 batch of students appeared to be same notes given to 2017 compatriots verbatim, the word is verbatim, no update, no review, it’s just copy cut design. And almost all the universities are guilty of this gullible backward driving approach.



Again during examination, another sad development our team unconvered was about the trend of questions students are made to answer during exams.

There’s this phenomenon which was common, repetition of past questions, l understand every school does it but what’s happening in various universities is mind boggling, based on a particular lecturer’s discretion, previous exams questions could be repeated verbatim for several years and most students have become familiar with these trends and instead decide to abandon lectures and use the entire semester flipping through pages of past questions for examination redemption.

Sad, isn’t it ? Because the system leaves no incentive for rigorous studies, but this was just a tip of the iceberg considering other funny stuffs we uncovered.



There was another exams style students we talked to complained bitterly about, l don’t want to pass judgement on them because I’m no academic expert but based on the sentiments expressed, l gathered most of them were seething with frustration.

Fill in style of exams, which one student labelled it as “a lazy approach” by “lazy lecturers” they do it so that they can hand it to their TA’s to mark.

Under this non academic stimulating process, students are expected to memorize their lecture notes word for word , what students called “chew and pour ”. To survive in this territory of exams you have to be “a good chewer of notes” to make A in such exams.

Question are set leaving blank spaces from selected portions of lecture notes and students are asked to fill these blank spaces with specific words from the notes given. One student who spoke to me under a condition of anonymity said , “we are not giving any room to think, analyse or apply what we have learnt throughout the semester, if you can’t chew and pour forget it”

I understand examination is a kind of assessment to elicit feedback from students to assess how far what was thought was understood and how the knowledge acquired could be used to address immediate and future challenges but if we have a situation where students are allowed to chew just notes and reproduce same in exams, are we really training the minds of our students, how do we expect industries and corporations to employ such students into their firms, to do what? because what is required at the job market is practical, how knowledge acquired from school could be applied in the field is what’s needed.

Chew and pour has no place on the job market, this partially explains why firms and corporations retain “tired brains” instead of giving a chance to fresh graduates, in their stead, the rate of messing up is guaranteed and no employer would take the risk.

We always talk about our students being lazy without paying particular attention to the kind of interactions teachers have with our wards in school.

My recommendations

Heads of various institutions must desist from assessing lecturers performance only at the end of a semester, rather in the course of the semester we need a design to be able monitor what a lecturer is doing, this will prevent those who exercise poor academic discretions from polluting students.



Again a particular attention must be turned to end of semester academic assessment of lecturers and those guilty of academic pollution with overwhelming evidential value should be sacked to deter further engagement and future indulgence.



Again mode of employing lectures must be holistic and should be based on intense review of knowledge depth credentials not just certificates and those selected should be given a year or two probation before offering them a permanent appointment. Most universities are found of admitting students who made it into the first class category as teaching assistance (T A’s) who are later giving the opportunity to advance to become lecturers, but we forget that most of these first class folks were those who were experts in chew and pour venture, no diversity in terms of knowledge, because their study was based solely on mastering a particular lecture notes and reproduce verbatim in exams which is easy but those who read from other sources to expand their horizons are seen as academic failures.

Let’s join the crusade if indeed we are serious to bridge the huge gab between academic intelligence and intelligence required at the job market , but if we continue on this tangent we will continue to breed half baked intellectual with just paper honours (certificates).

Let’s reward knowledge versatility and desist from this narrow path of academic demonisation.

Let’s break the chew and pour hegemony colonizing our universities and save our generations from eventual academic embarrassment.