Universities in the country have been charged by the National Universities Commission, NUC, to take issues of quality assurance seriously in order to maintain high academic standards.

The Director of Quality Assurance in the Commission, Dr Noel Saliu, gave the advice on Monday at a “Coordination Meeting for Post Graduate Accreditation” staged at the NUC auditorium in Abuja, which attracted professors from some Nigerian universities.

He informed that the Department of Quality Assurance was established in 2005 with the mandate to “ensure compliance with approved Benchmark Minimum Academic Standards and other quality assurance instruments required for Nigerian universities to meet national needs and global competitiveness.”

According to the Director, universities are quality assurance institutions while NUC is a quality assurance agency.

In his words, “If we do not pay close attention to internal quality assurance, we will have problems with accreditation.

“The internal quality assurance mechanism is vital; if we get it right, then we have got 70 per cent of quality issues.”

Earlier, the Executive Secretary of the NUC, Prof. Julius Okogie, hinted that a number of variables were responsible for quality assurance of academic programmes.

He then listed the variables to include the accreditation of academic programmes or institutions, monitoring, assessment and evaluation of existing staff strength, students and facilities, capacity building for teaching and non-teaching staff.

Others, according to Okogie are: exchange programme for personnel, prescription of benchmarks and periodic review and production of instruments on minimum academic standards as well as external moderation system.