ENTRY QUALIFICATIONS AND ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE OF ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS IN BUILDING STRUCTURES

A prerequisite for admission into higher education in Nigeria is meeting the criteria set by the National Universities Commission (NUC). Apart from obtaining acceptable scores in the unified matriculation examinations, candidates are also expected to obtain at least credit grades in some subjects at the end of their secondary school education. For architecture these prerequisite subjects include physics and mathematics. However, there have been debates in recent times as to the relevance of these prerequisites to students' academic performance after admission. This has been necessitated by suggestions that university students' performance do not always reflect their pre-admission academic performance. It is in the light of this that this paper examines the correlation between the scores of students of architecture in some admission prerequisite subjects (mathematics and physics) and building structures - a core course for the study of architecture in Nigerian universities. The study adopts a combination of primary and secondary data. Data were obtained through literature survey, archival retrieval of students' records and augmented by discussions with course tutors and students. Quantitative data was analyzed using the SPSS (version17) while content analysis was used for qualitative data. This paper found that except for the second semester of the second year of architecture studies, there exists no correlation between admission qualification and academic performance of students. However, it found that female students outperformed their male counterparts in all the semesters. It is hoped that the outcome of this paper will inform university admission policy especially for architecture and ensure that the best candidates are given opportunity to study.