Quality Assured?
I’ve been hearing stories from university staff (not necessarily Mekelle Uni), where teachers have been told that all the students must pass, with the standard of the students being almost irrelevant. I’m trying to work out the reasoning behind this, but I can’t see any obvious rationale apart from not wanting to let students down and harm their future job prospects. There are also plans that Ethiopian universities will be offering 10,000 masters and 500 doctorates, so I’m hoping that the same ‘standards’ aren’t applied here just to be able to make up numbers.
I’ve also had comments made to me by university lecturers, where they say that whenever they write a reference for a student, the student will always have come in at least the top 10% of their class (no matter what their actual grade). I’m not saying this is common practice across all lecturers – I simply don’t know if it is or not, but it does seem to fit with the general culture here, where ‘no’ isn’t a word heard very often, even if hearing it would be in your best interests. An excellent example is when a few of us went out for a meal, the waitress took our drinks order, but rather than admit they’d run out of bottled beer, she took the order, but then just didn’t bring the beer!
I find all this rather worrying, if I were an employer or in a university admissions department, how could I make an informed decision given a set of references where everyone was in the top 10% of their class. References here seem to carry more weight in the recruitment process than they would do in the UK. It also belittles the efforts of those students who do put the work in and actually are in the top of their class.
P.s. no, this isn’t an April Fools joke!
