Finally, the hour is here. Tekedia Mini-MBA begins tomorrow, Monday, Sept 12 2022, at 12 noon WAT.  On behalf of our faculty, staff and our alumni, let me welcome everyone. We have scheduled business executives from SAP Africa, Microsoft (USA), Barry Callebaut Group (Belgium), etc for the live Zoom classes.

They will focus on business innovation and design thinking. Later, other faculty members will move into business growth. Then, towards the end of the program in December, we move to operational execution; we bring in startups/SMEs CEOs for cases and lessons learned. It is a festival on business mechanics and entrepreneurial capitalism.

I am very confident that by the time you spend 12 weeks in our award-winning business school ( Velocity Mhagic’s $60,000 winner), you will see business and market differently.

This will be the best N60,000 or $140 you would be spending on learning; a promise to be kept. We continue to welcome new learners. Click and register today 

Ndubuisi Ekekwe, PhD, MBA

Professor & Lead Faculty

Tekedia Institute, USA

Who can grade JAMB? Why is it that no person (to my knowledge) has scored 100/100 in JAMB Mathematics in Nigeria? If you have had an exam since the late 1970s, and no student entering university in Nigeria has scored 100%, is it time to ask questions?

Sure – someone broke 99 in the last few years but I am not aware of 100%. Contrast that with JAMB alternatives like SAT (undergraduate) and GRE (graduate). Yours truly scored 800/800 in GRE Mathematics. But it was not a big deal as most engineering PhD students into top-10 universities break that in US.

Do you know of anyone who scored 100/100 in JAMB Mathematics? I am just curious because it seems really intriguing for a Math exam since 1978. Yes, I find it hard to believe that JAMB is that hard for a kid in Nigeria not to have cracked that perfect score in decades.

Update: someone had noted that someone had actually recorded 100 in JAMB. So, the 100 is not for the aliens.

Comment on LinkedIn Feed

Comment 1: 800/800 on GRE?

Incredible!!!

That’s an electrifying brain there. Success truly is predictable. People who make impact today have at some point in their life when growing up shown predictable signs of it.

Be it in politics, religion, academics, entrepreneurship etcetera. Whenever I dive into the biographies of people like Peter Obi, Tinubu, Oyedepo, Elumelu, Strive Masiyiwa and now our own truly, Prof Ndubisi Ekekwe.

I’m always overwhelmed with the results these people were commanding in their early 30s that I used to ask myself, are will (who are in this age bracket) ever going to match 1/10th of their abilities, looking at how far they have come in the journey at such age?

My Response: GRE Math 800/800 is very common. If you get the first say 20 questions out of say 40 correct, it may cut-off and give you 800/800. It is not designed to punish, rather to gauge your mathematical ability. But if you get 2 wrong in the first 10 questions, even if you get the balance 38 correct, you cannot score up to 700.

Why? When you begin, you start with “middle difficulty” in the questions. If you keep getting the questions right, the system will bring “harder and harder”. If you sustain that and by 20th question and you are still getting it, it awards you 800/800 and tells you to go home.

But if you fail two in the first 10, it will offer easier and easier questions, and if you keep failing some, it will return the real easiest. You may get those but it marks you below 600.

Comment 1b: No surprises here really. The Nigerian system is programmed to fail you by default. No wonder people who struggled to finish 2:2 here cross over and start breaking records, a system where the lecturer tells you A is for God, B is for his mum in the village, but C downwards is up for grabs for all all interested. It can be better, but at this time, nahh.

Comment 2: I don’t think we can compare Jamb with GRE. you won’t see a graduate student, PHD or someone going for masters degree taking JAMB. however GRE seems very much open in the sense that someone going for PhD take it just like someoone going for masters and possibly even someone going for bachelors degree, just like you have mentioned.

Imagine an engineering PhD candidate takes Jamb math ? . As we all know, folks that takes Jamb are much younger with less educational knowledge and experience compared to folks that takes GRE.

My Response: used the word “Contrast”, not “compare” and added SAT which is JAMB peer. But since Nigeria does not have central exam for post-graduate, I lumped in GRE. You focused on the GRE, ignoring the SAT.

(GRE is more difficult than JAMB just as GRE is more difficult than SAT. GRE is not measuring your math skills but your math heuristics in a grading scale. If you fail the first two questions and get the last say 38 correct, your score will not be above 600/800. But if you get the first 20 right, you may not even need to stay for the last 20 to get 800/800. That is the difference)

Many questions on my piece on the path for Africa’s development and industrialization. Please note that investing more money in universities is not the absolute solution for deepening youth digital competitiveness. Pardon me, and hold the verbal missiles; I am not saying that African governments should not invest in universities  after I have attended one largely free in Africa. Here is my postulation:

China has 99% primary education enrollment with less than 10% university attainment. They put all the best money in basic education (primary and secondary school levels), making sure that it is really great. For the university, they don’t really care that much. They outcompeted the world when they unleashed highly prepared young people into manufacturing lines upon their admission into the World Trade Organization (WTO).

In the United States, they do the same, making basic education free up to secondary school level. If you want to attend a university, pay for it or take a loan, in a situation you cannot get the limited available scholarships.

In Africa, we flip that. While Nigerian university lecturers are on strike, asking for more money (they do deserve it), no one remembers the primary and secondary school teachers. If Nigeria pays a professor of music $1000* monthly, a mathematics may be earning $50 in a public primary school. As a result of the paltry salary, public basic education has struggled or collapsed as with the cases in Sokoto and Zamfara states where public students have not sat for WAEC for two years.

The poor public school quality has created a vicious circle where extremely unprepared kids are “graduated” and fed into the university system. In the last JAMB exam, the cut-off to enter universities was dropped to 140. The implication is that you need just a 35% score to enter the Nigerian university system. Does that make sense? Not really!

For the postulation I have put forward to work, Africa needs to invest in its primary and secondary education, not just the universities. That implies that we must revamp our curriculum and have more practical with the elevation of technical colleges where young people could be exposed to practical elements of learning. 

Yes, we must not think just improving the universities without the understanding that great primary and secondary education remains the catalyst to deepen national competitiveness through talent. Indeed, to export digital skills to Europe and US, Africa must deepen basic education because that is the fundamental pipeline to acquire the critical knowledge to thrive in a modern world.

*that is close using the official rate

How Africa Will Develop: Europe/US Outsourced Factory Jobs to China; Africa Will Export Digital Skills to Them