Discordant notes and scores in students’ performance

Students’ recurrent disappointing performance in university semester examinations seems to suggest that there could be a number of problems that teachers and educationists need to attend to for standards to be redeemed. Using about a hundred final-year English Studies students’ answer scripts in a Nigerian state university as guide, this paper advances indicators of students’ unpreparedness for examinations and, in the light of these indicators, hints that: (a) students’ lack of basic writing and expressive skills overshadows their knowledge; (b) students’ answers seem to point to certain reading and learning problems; (c) in instances where students seem to have a good knowledge of a topic, their lack of strong argumentation skills obfuscates their writing; and (d) teachers and other educationists may need to be more attentive to students’ reading, comprehension and integration skills to improve the students’ proficiency in basic writing and expressive writing for better grades in examinations. While the typology presented in the paper may not yet be evidence of a national problem, it indicates, at least, that many of our students are yet to get the hang of the essential requirements of academic writing.