Kaduna state Scholarship and Loans Board has said that a total of 9, 409 students applied for the 2019/2020 bursary, indicating a 13.35% increase over last academic year.
A statement signed by the Executive Secretary of the Board, Hassan Rilwan, announcing the 2019/2020 bursary application results, said that 8,301 applicants had earlier applied for the 2018/2019 bursary.
Giving a breakdown of this academic year’s applications, he said 9,219 students applied for general bursary, while 58 students applied for bursary for Arabic .
According to him, 27 applicants applied for French bursary, while 84 students applied for disability bursary and 21 students applied for sports based bursary.
The Executive Secretary said that ‘’students showed increase interest and the number of applicants would have been more but for the advent of the Coronavirus pandemic.’’
The statement further said that ‘’4,358 students passed this essay assessment which is a 7.8% increase over the 3,198 students who passed the 2018/2019 bursary application. ‘’
Hassan said that even though the number of students that passed the essay writing assessment is not close to the available 10,000 slots, progress is nonetheless being made.
The statement which decried the high rate of plagiarism, advised students to stop relying on business centre operators to write essays for them, arguing that ‘’ a review of the results revealed that more students have the capacity to pass.’’
The Board discovered that some ‘’ business centre operators submit one essay for over 100 students in some cases. Students must learn to write essays themselves to improve their chances of getting bursaries.’’
According to Hassan, the Board has decided to accredit business centers in schools having more than 100 applicants, promising that it ‘’will release the names of the accredited business centres in due course.’’
‘’One of the objectives of the Board is to improve the ability of our students to write good personal statements for the numerous international scholarship opportunities available worldwide.
