A total of 103 students are to receive the First Class Degree certificate of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) during its 8th convocation ceremony to be held in Abuja this Saturday.
At a pre-convocation press briefing on Tuesday in Abuja, the vice chancellor of the university, Professor Abdalla Uba Adamu, said a total number of 20,799 students are participating in the convocation from the Faculties of Agricultural Science, Arts, Education, Law Health Sciences, Management Sciences and Social Sciences.
According to him, “This is the first time in the history of any university that such a large number of students would bag First Class at a sitting. This is the highest in our history and the highest single graduation of students in a single year in Nigeria.”
He said the best graduating student is one Bala Salihu Magaji, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Islamic Studies.
While speaking on the importance of NOUN programme, he announced that considering the magnitude of graduating students this year, the theme of ‘ODL As Weapons of Mass Instruction’ was carefully adopted to buttress the level of progress being made in the university. ODL, which is an acronym for Open and Distant Learning, he said is ‘self-drive and an enabler’.
He used the opportunity to clear the air about the accreditation of some courses like Law and the possibility of its graduates participating in the NYSC scheme as well as law school.
According to him: “Right now, negotiation is on concerning the fate of our graduates to participate both in NYSC and law school programmes. We have gone very far in that regard; the only thing we have done is to suspend fresh admission into that department temporarily until we have sorted out all the gray areas, however, we have made it possible for our graduates to proceed for their Masters and Doctoral degrees before they can even be called up for the NYSC and law school programmes respectively.”
