By Augustine Okezie
The Book Development Committee set up by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) has decried what the inability of most postgraduate students in the universities to write good thesis.
They have, therefore, urged the federal government to urgently revisit the criteria for the training and award of postgraduate degrees in the universities.
Speaking at Technical Advisory Group (TAG) of TETFund National Book Development Fund (BDF) intervention meeting Tuesday in Abuja, the chairman of the sub-committee on book, Prof Charles Aworh, said the nation’s tertiary education sector had degenerated to a point that most postgraduate students “cannot write good theses.”
He said in an effort to end the trend, they had decided to work with National Universities Commission (NUC) to help redress it.
“We want NUC to ensure that postgraduate training is strengthened, that the process of examination of PhD theses is corrected because that is where the problems lie,” he said.
Aworh noted the unfortunate situation whereby thesis that had been accepted by the universities within years would be found wanting, saying that it’s an embarrassing trend which NUC had to intervene urgently.
“Unfortunately, there are many poor written theses, we looked at over 200 written theses of which we selected about 50 that we thought will met the criteria for conversion into books but by the time we sent these theses to Nigerian professors, they came with a damning reports on most of the thesis and of the 50, only 11 were found worth converting into book.
“That tells the sorry situation in which our universities are, if we are producing PhD theses and professors will look at them and find faults on degrees that has been awarded and people has been awarded with PhD then we are really in trouble in the country, we need to revisit the issue of postgraduate training in our universities, that is another outcome from this exercise.”
