Why an A+ No Longer Impresses Me

I was scrolling through my Facebook feed this (Thursday) evening, as I often do, when I came across a short skit. An interviewer asked a student what mistake she had made in her life that she would never want to repeat. Her response was straightforward. It was coming to UI, that is, attending the University of Ibadan. As an alumnus of what is often described as Nigeria’s own Harvard or Oxford, I could not dismiss the student’s response. I attended the University of Ibadan myself, and I have my own experiences with its authority structures, lecturers, assessment practices, institutional culture, and general modus operandi. I therefore understand why someone might arrive at such a conclusion.

At the same time, I hesitate to accept the claim without qualification. Part of the problem is that we sometimes talk about the university as though students enter it with a clear understanding of what higher education is supposed to be. They do not. Some students see the university as a sanctuary for intellectual development. Others experience it primarily as a place they must survive, obtain a credential, and leave. If we ask students why they feel this way, they may point to teaching methods, learning environments, mentorship, assessment, institutional culture, relationships with lecturers, or a combination of these and other factors. But that is not quite the question I want to pursue here.

My interest is particularly in what happens when students who were educated in Nigerian institutions, especially institutions such as the University of Ibadan, move into European or North American higher education. After watching the video, I made a brief comment that I want to revisit more carefully here. I suggested that if someone completed a degree at the University of Ibadan with the lowest classification, I would not necessarily be surprised if that same person went on to excel academically in Europe or North America. I was making a broad claim, and I still think there is something worth examining in it.

To be clear, I am not arguing that European or North American universities are easier than Nigerian universities. They are not. Nor am I suggesting that Nigerian curricula are inherently superior or that students trained in Nigeria automatically possess greater intellectual ability. The issue is more complicated. Educational systems do not merely teach content. They also teach students how to learn, how to demonstrate learning, what counts as knowledge, what constitutes a good answer, and what forms of intellectual performance are rewarded. That distinction matters.

Those of us who move from Nigerian institutions into European or North American universities often discover that we have to revisit Alvin Toffler’s famous formulation about learning, unlearning, and relearning. There is a different educational culture to navigate. There are similarities, certainly, but there are also significant differences in pedagogy, classroom participation, assessment, writing, research, argumentation, and the relationship between students and professors. You may have been extremely successful in one educational culture precisely because you mastered what that culture rewarded. Then you enter another culture and discover that the rules have changed.

This is where I think the question of assessment becomes particularly important. During my own graduate education, I had an experience that brought this question into sharper focus for me. I once met with a professor because I wanted to discuss the way I had been assessed on an assignment. I was not merely unhappy with the grade. My concern was that I genuinely did not think the assessment, as designed, was a particularly good way of evaluating what I had learned. I wanted to understand the rationale behind it and to question whether the assessment was actually capturing the kind of learning the course was supposed to cultivate.

The professor’s response caught me somewhat off guard. I was asked, essentially, whether I wanted to rework the assignment so that I could improve my grade. But that was not why I had raised the issue. I remember responding, in effect, that I am not bringing this up because of the grade. That moment has stayed with me because it captured something that I think we often miss when discussing assessment. We are quick to assume that a student’s objection to an assessment is really an objection to the grade received. Sometimes it is. But not always.

A student can receive a good grade and still question whether the assessment was educationally meaningful. A student can receive a poor grade and accept that the assessment was appropriate. A student can also question an assessment not because they want more marks, but because they are asking a more fundamental question about what exactly we are trying to assess and why. That distinction matters. My concern was not whether I could turn the grade into a higher grade. My concern was whether the assessment itself was aligned with what I believed we were trying to accomplish through feedback in graduate education.

This experience also reminded me of a conversation I once had with a friend who asked why we seemed to assess so much of what students know rather than how and why they know it. That question stayed with me. There is nothing inherently wrong with knowing what. Knowledge of facts, concepts, theories, dates, definitions, arguments, and texts matters. But knowing what something is does not exhaust intellectual competence. We also need to ask whether the student can explain it, apply it, critique it, connect it to another context, defend it, reconstruct it, use it to solve a problem, recognize its limitations, and determine when and why that knowledge matters.

The problem, therefore, is not that Nigerian students learn too much. Nor is memorization inherently bad. Memorization can be an important part of learning. The problem emerges when a particular form of assessment becomes the dominant mechanism through which we decide who is intelligent, who is successful, and who deserves the highest grade. I have encountered this tension even in graduate education. I remember being frustrated by the tendency to regard students who struggled to master theoretical material as somehow less successful, even when they demonstrated competence in other dimensions of learning.

This made me think about the relationship between theory and praxis. One is not necessarily superior to the other. They complement each other. A student may be exceptionally good at understanding and reproducing theoretical arguments but struggle to apply them. Another may have an extraordinary capacity to apply ideas to concrete situations but struggle with abstract theoretical formulations. Why should one necessarily be regarded as more intellectually capable than the other? This, for me, is one of the deeper questions about assessment.

Imagine a student who graduates from Institution X with the lowest degree classification. What exactly does that classification tell us? It tells us something about how that student performed under the assessment regime of Institution X, but it does not necessarily tell us everything about the student’s intellectual capacities. This distinction becomes particularly visible when students move across educational systems. I have seen students who struggled academically in Nigerian institutions subsequently earn excellent grades in European or North American universities. I have also seen the reverse. Students who performed exceptionally well in one system can encounter considerable difficulty in another.

There are many possible explanations. Perhaps the student’s intellectual strengths were not adequately recognized by the previous system. Perhaps the student had learned to succeed through a particular mode of assessment that did not transfer easily. Perhaps the new institution provided opportunities for different forms of participation and demonstration of knowledge. Perhaps the student matured academically. Or perhaps several of these factors operated simultaneously. This is why I am cautious about reading too much into a degree classification without considering the conditions under which that classification was produced.

One of the things I have come to appreciate about my experience in North American higher education is the range of ways in which students can demonstrate what they know. This is not to romanticize the system. It has its own problems. Students can encounter different forms of assessment, classroom activities, projects, discussions, presentations, written assignments, group work, reflections, applied tasks, and opportunities to revise their work. These can create possibilities for students whose strengths may not be fully visible in a predominantly examination-oriented environment.

Sometimes these activities reveal abilities that were previously hidden. A student who is not particularly good at reproducing information under examination conditions may be excellent at constructing an argument. Another may be an exceptional writer but a poor test-taker. Someone else may demonstrate remarkable creativity, collaboration, problem-solving, or practical intelligence. Again, this does not mean that one form of assessment is inherently better than another. It means that different forms of assessment make different dimensions of learning visible.

And that matters. When students who have spent years learning primarily through one model encounter another, the transition can be both liberating and disorienting. The possibilities can be exciting because they may finally discover capacities that were not previously rewarded. The transition can also be difficult because they must learn how to operate within a new set of expectations. You may know how to read a textbook from beginning to end, memorize its central arguments, reproduce quotations, and demonstrate that you have mastered its content from A to Z.

Then a professor asks you to do something entirely different. What do you think about this argument? What is missing from this theory? How would you apply this idea to another context? Can you challenge the author's assumptions? For someone trained primarily to demonstrate mastery through reproduction, these questions can be surprisingly difficult. Not because the student is unintelligent. Because the student has been configured to learn differently.

This brings me to another observation. In my experience, grades in some North American and European contexts can sometimes appear more attainable than what many Nigerian students have experienced. I have encountered professors who allow students to revisit assignments, revise their work, and improve their grades. That possibility can be relatively unfamiliar to students who were trained in educational environments where an assessment is often understood as a final judgment. You submit, you receive your grade, and you move on.

Again, this is not universal. There are certainly Nigerian lecturers who provide feedback and opportunities for improvement, just as there are European and North American professors who maintain very rigid assessment practices. The difference, therefore, is not merely geographical. It is institutional and cultural. And this is where I become somewhat uncomfortable with the other side of the equation, grade inflation. I have increasingly wondered what happens when a culture of continuous revision, student satisfaction, flexible assessment, and high expectations for grades produces a situation in which almost everyone expects an A or A+.

We should not blame students for this alone. Students pay enormous amounts of money for higher education. Many take on substantial loans. They understandably want to perform well and obtain grades that reflect their investment. But there is something intellectually troubling about a culture in which an A+ can gradually become an expectation rather than an achievement. The proliferation of high grades does not necessarily mean that students have suddenly become more intellectually capable. It may also tell us something about the assessment system itself. This is why I sometimes find myself less impressed by a transcript filled with As and A+s than I once might have been.

That is not because I believe those students are undeserving of celebration. They should be celebrated. Earning excellent grades requires effort, discipline, and commitment. Rather, I have become increasingly skeptical about what grades, by themselves, can tell us about intellectual formation.

This brings me back to UI. The University of Ibadan is not an easy environment. At least, that was not my experience. There is a particular kind of academic culture that develops in an institution where students are expected to work hard, cope with institutional constraints, navigate demanding courses, and figure out how to succeed within a system that may not always accommodate every learner in the same way. That experience can be frustrating. It can be unnecessarily harsh. It can exclude students whose strengths do not align with the dominant model.

But it can also produce resilience. A student who learns to survive and succeed in such an environment may develop a certain capacity to work under pressure. When that student eventually encounters a different educational system, one that provides more varied opportunities to demonstrate competence, the student may discover that the skills developed earlier were not useless after all. They may simply need to be reorganized. This is why I would not automatically interpret a low degree classification from UI as evidence of low intellectual capacity. Nor would I interpret a first-class degree as definitive evidence of superior intellectual ability. Both classifications are products of a particular institutional and assessment context.

So, was coming to UI a mistake? I do not know. Perhaps for the student in that video, it was. Educational institutions can fail students. They can be rigid, hierarchical, exclusionary, poorly resourced, badly administered, or pedagogically unimaginative. Students have every right to criticize those failures. But I also think we should be careful about reducing the university experience to whether students received the grades they wanted or whether the system made their academic lives comfortable.

The university is not supposed to be merely comfortable. It is supposed to be formative. The more difficult question is what kind of formation is taking place. Are students learning only how to pass examinations, or are they learning how to think? Are we rewarding only the ability to reproduce knowledge, or are we cultivating the capacity to question, interpret, apply, create, and judge? Are grades telling us what students know, or are they telling us how successfully students have learned to navigate a particular assessment system? These questions extend far beyond the University of Ibadan. They concern higher education generally.

Perhaps we should stop treating grades as universal measurements. My experiences across educational systems have made me increasingly suspicious of the idea that grades can travel seamlessly across contexts. A 3.7 GPA, a first-class, a second-class upper, an A+, or a distinction does not carry an identical meaning everywhere. These classifications are produced within particular institutional cultures, curricula, grading practices, assessment philosophies, and expectations. This does not make grades meaningless. It means that grades require context.

A student’s transcript tells us something. It does not tell us everything. Perhaps this is why I would not be surprised to see someone who struggled academically at UI later excel in Europe or North America. The explanation need not be that one system is easier and the other harder. It may be that the student encountered a different educational environment, one that recognized and rewarded capacities that had previously been less visible. And perhaps this is also why someone who excelled spectacularly in one institution may struggle when the rules change.

Education is not merely about possessing knowledge. It is also about learning how to use knowledge within particular contexts. I have never been particularly convinced that numerical grading systems can adequately capture intellectual development. I understand their administrative usefulness. Institutions need ways to communicate performance, make decisions, and distinguish levels of achievement. But we should resist the temptation to treat the number as the person. The student with the lowest degree classification is not necessarily the least intelligent person in the room. The student with the A+ is not necessarily the most intellectually capable. The first-class graduate is not necessarily more thoughtful than the second-class graduate. And the student who struggled in one educational system may thrive spectacularly in another.

What changes is not always the student. Sometimes, the conditions under which the student’s capacities become visible change. That, perhaps, is the more important lesson. So when I hear someone say that attending the University of Ibadan was the biggest mistake they made, I understand the frustration (I have been there, lol). I also understand the institution well enough to know why someone might say it. But I would not want us to stop there. We should ask a more uncomfortable question. What does it mean when an educational system can tell a student that they are academically unsuccessful, only for another system to reveal that they were capable of succeeding all along? Perhaps the problem is not always the student. Perhaps, sometimes, we need to interrogate the system that decided what counted as success in the first place.