A few weeks ago, I defended a Master’s thesis in Mathematical Sciences at AIMS-Ghana. A few days later, I received a transcript of my academic records, from the same institution. There was something particular about receiving the transcript that made me think about how the entire academic year has been for me, what I liked, what I did not like or understand, and what my impressions are about the AIMS academic experience in general, now that I have been through it.

However, before proceeding any further, I think a disclaimer is in order. I am not an academic (yet), neither am I a manager by any stretch of the term. I have never run an academic institution before. As such, the purpose of this essay is not to criticize the hard work of those who set up AIMS, but to attempt to engage more or less critically with the ideas, practices and philosophies I observed during my stay at AIMS, particularly those I found problematic. I am fully aware that due to the limitations of my experience, some of the impressions and opinions presented here may be faulty, or downright wrong. For those, I would appreciate an appropriate response.

First of all, there are no examinations at AIMS (not only Ghana, it seems, but all AIMS centers as well). Under normal circumstances, this should be good news for any student. No examinations means less stress cramming, and no staying up late at night. This would be a rosy picture, except that every academic institution has to have a way of measuring the performance of its students. AIMS’s method of choice was assignments. Every student has to complete weekly assignments for each course, which amounted to 3 assignments for each course (Each course lasts 3 weeks).

Why would this be problematic? First of all, most of the assignments had solutions posted on the Internet. There was really no practical need to thinking through anything, or to actually master the material taught in class. All you had to do was look whatever you needed up in Google, or math stack exchange, and everything would be okay.

Now, for argument’s sake, let’s even suppose that the problems were so esoteric that one couldn’t find the solutions on the Internet, and that there are (as in the case of my batch) 40 students, working on an assignment containing 3 problems. All at the same time, mind you. What are the chances that if one student gets the solution, she wouldn’t simply communicate it to the others? If there are 3 particularly brilliant and hardworking students in that class, what says that they would not do most, if not all the assignments, and the remaining 37 simply copy, modify, paste and submit?

Now, it is no secret that a major component of understanding and getting good at mathematics is actually interacting with the material, staying with a problem, trying different techniques until you find one that works. However, in a system where all of that effort is made redundant, where the solution is possibly a Google search away, or you just need to talk to a classmate to get the solution, what incentive is there to work hard? Only the most motivated students would have the restraint necessary to follow the ‘straight and narrow road’ of putting in all the effort required.

That poses two problems:

1. There is inevitably angst on the part of those who actually put in all the effort and do the work. Why should I get the same score with a classmate, when I spent hours mastering the material, and he simply read the solution off math stack exchange? Life is probably not fair, but isn’t it the whole point of AIMS that we ALL are supposed to work hard? It is much easier to put in effort, to work extra hard, when you have peers who hold similar values, and when the system actually rewards those values. When that is not the case, hard work actually makes you feel foolish.

2. It brings the question as to what the purpose of those assignments really are. What do they measure? Respect for deadlines? Ability to work in a given time frame? Comprehension of material? Ability to communicate? Given that everybody submits pretty much the same assignment, only at different times, and with different words, why should any two people have different scores on any given assignment? Given that the one who gets the highest score probably did because he copied it from the Internet, what behavior is actually being rewarded?

At some point, I think the administration realized that the assignment system had serious shortcomings, and so they introduced quizzes to make sure students were actually studying, and understanding the material (I hear last year, they did monthly interviews instead). Interestingly, the quizzes proposed were supposed to last 5 minutes. What, honestly, can you test in 5 minutes?

Many times I had the impression that the professors understood, or at least thought, that we (the students) were not talented enough, did not understand the material well enough, or were not willing to work hard enough. Consequently, they gave easy assignments to enable everybody pass. This for me was a very serious issue. Even without the professors giving simple assignments, the whole system feels like it is set up to make students feel good about themselves. Not that I have any particular issue with raising people’s self esteem, but, where else in the world are professors at the graduate level so concerned about their students' self esteem, so much as to lower the academic requirements for them? Giving easy assignments, making quizzes cheap, so that everybody passes, probably works best in the short run: everybody feels good, nobody repeats (and so no scholarship money is wasted), but is that in the best interests of the students?

There are large mathematical centers in Europe, and North America, whose aim is similar to that of AIMS. The most popular of these amongst AIMS students are the Berlin Mathematical School in Germany, or BMS for short, and Heriot-Watt University in the UK. They may not probably be looking for the next Einstein from Europe or Russia, but they are committed to raising a generation of excellent mathematicians, and making the most of the mathematical talent in their keep. Question is, how high are the standards there? It is a truism that they hold themselves to higher standards than AIMS does. I think it is necessary to precise that the standard in question is WAY higher. However, these are the people AIMS graduates are supposed to be competing with. How on earth is that possible?

As of July 2014, AIMS had trained over 700 mathematicians (AIMS-NEI newsletter, January 2014). How many of them have gained admissions to such institutions as BMS? Before anyone claims that many didn’t apply, I would beg to differ. In my batch alone, at least half of the class applied to BMS. There is no reason to think that our class was the exception; that previous batches were simply not interested in studying mathematics in such an institution. But then, when checking the student profile of BMS, I could only identify 3 AIMS alumni. That’s just one example. What about the other leading universities in the UK? Oxford? Heriot-Watt? Edinburgh? How many AIMS graduates can comfortably compete with graduates from such places? Can AIMS comfortably assert that the average one of their graduates can compete internationally? If the answer to that question is no (which I think it is), is it right to place emphasis on making the graduate feel good, instead of making her competent? Should the standards be lowered just to make people pass? Why not raise the bar at the admissions instead? Or emphasize the high standards, and find ways to motivate students to make the necessary effort to attain them?

Many times, thinking about this made me come to the conclusion that the primary mission of AIMS is to increase knowledge and awareness of Mathematics and Mathematical sciences in Africa, and not find the next Einstein, as is so claimed. AIMS may hope to produce such talent, but the emphasis seems to be on getting everyone to pass, not to making the talented ones excel. A place dedicated to looking for Einstein, in this competitive world, would have far higher standards than those I met.

Now, probably the biggest of my pet peeves. According to policy at AIMS, students do not get to see their transcripts, or know what grades they have obtained, until the end of the academic year. This was the part that puzzled me the most. I have pondered on the rationale for such a policy over and over, and the only reasonable explanations I have come up with are:

1. They do not want students to obsess over grades during the academic year
2. They want to eliminate competition from AIMS in order to promote cooperation and teamwork.
3. There are non-native English speakers in our midst, and they might get discouraged if they fail too much.
4. They realize the system is flawed, and they need the privacy to be able to change students' grades as they see fit.

I will tackle each of these explanations one after the other.

Possibility number 1: they do not want students to obsess over grades during the academic year. I have to admit that this is quite a noble objective, which, if actually realized, would help both students and professors alike. It has been my experience, throughout my academic career, that very few students actually feel that they received the grades they deserve, and so taking away the experience of the grading process, together with the grades, helps professors, since they do not have to bother about students asking them about why they received such and such grades on a particular assignment. However, to think that students do not obsess over grades they do not see is fallacious. Students do obsess about those grades. It is a normal part of the student experience. Also, at the end of the day, those grades represent their tickets to the next level in their academic journey. Those who do not want to stay in academia may not bother, but the majority of students at AIMS dream of being Mathematics or Engineering PhDs. The grades they receive are the tangible rewards of their work, probably the only way to measure their understanding of concepts, the amount of work they need to put in future courses, and how efficient their current methods of work are. Taking away the grades simply results in students who have no bearing on their academic standing. More so, such a practice compounds the obsession when they finally receive the grades, because they wonder whether those grades actually reflect their work during the year. More on that later.

Possibility number 2: They want to eliminate competition from AIMS in order to promote cooperation and teamwork. By the way, what is so terrible about competition that warrants its total elimination from an institution like this? Personally, I have performed my best when there was healthy competition between me and my peers, where we all had to work hard, to drive ourselves to our limits, to be the best in the cohort concerned. Consequently, I don’t understand why anybody would want to totally eliminate any form of competition between peers, or why they would even think that it was possible to do so. Even if competition was so terrible, what is the evidence that removing all grades actually prevents students from competing with each other?

Possibility number 3: This policy was meant not to discourage those of us who are not native English language speakers. This again, is a noble objective. But it begs questioning. Why don’t you want to discourage them? If you were cognizant of the difficulties they would face once admitted into the program, why would you set up the system to favor them to other students' disfavor? I have already discussed the point on discouraging and making students feel good about themselves in prior chapters, so I will not repeat those points here.

Possibility number 4: They realize the system is flawed, and they need to compensate for some marks before making the grades public. On what basis will this compensation be done then? Why not simply try to rectify the perceived defaults in the system at once?

On a more general level, there are more interesting questions I have not found answers to. What is the guarantee that my transcripts actually reflect the work I have done throughout the academic year? As of now, the only possible guarantee I have is the trust I placed in the authorities at AIMS. While I have no reason to distrust them, I also have to recognize that they are human, and prone to biases like everybody else. What happens if a student has a misunderstanding with a tutor, or the academic manager, for example? What guarantees that the personal differences will not be transferred to the student’s academic records? After all, the student only sees those records in June, when it is too late. He is simply told that he had a “Good pass” in Algebra, which he took last November, and is asked to believe, or at least, accept it as true. He has no evidence with which to dispute those results, or even accept them as his own. How should he carry such records whose origins he is not entirely sure of, and which he cannot comfortably defend?

Now, there are surely many things I am missing. I would be naïve to think that I understand the objectives, philosophies and methods of AIMS as well as those who set everything up, especially that I was part of the system for barely 10 months. It would be equally naïve to think that I am the first person to ask such questions, or make such observations. Everything points to the conclusion that the authorities at AIMS have solid reasons behind all of the policies instituted there. But why would I have to think so hard about what I am made to go through? Is it not the responsibility of the AIMS academic board to communicate to me clearly what is expected from me, and why they adopted the systems they did?

There are quite a few other issues I found problematic, but they are minor issues, in my opinion. This essay is already quite lengthy, and it is not the forum for me to talk about minor issues.

Finally, I have a few suggestions to make.

I think that AIMS would better attain its objectives by offering a two-year research Masters in Mathematical Sciences. The current state of things is that every student does at least 17 courses in 10 months. When courses are studied for only three weeks, the best one can hope for is that the students simply get an overview of what the subject matter is. It would be a stretch to think that students actually get to master any given subject to the point of gaining the mathematical intuition necessary to carry out research. It comes as no surprise that very few AIMS students regard the AIMS diploma as a terminal degree. The vast majority go on to do 1- or 2- year MPhils in Africa or Europe. Considering a student who spent a year at AIMS, then went on to do a 2 -year MSc, he actually spent 3 years getting a Masters' degree. Why not spend the two years and get solid training at AIMS, then decide whether academia is really for you, or whether you want to move to industry?

Two years is quite a lot of time, enough to train people well, with the appropriate mathematical rigor, organize plenty of workshops, summer schools for those who had difficulties during the academic year and really improve programming and computing skills. The current assumption, as I understand it, is that African students are not exposed to many areas of mathematics. As such, AIMS aims to expose those students to as many areas of mathematics research as possible. I do not disagree with this, but unless there are statistics to show that students actually change their minds after getting the necessary exposure, I would posit that most students already have sketches of what areas of Mathematics they are interested in, and an Msc that enables them carry out substantial research in those areas would be great. Besides, AIMS has been trying to get students into industry. There would even be the possibility for students to carry out internships while at AIMS, that is, if it were a two-year program, and not 10 months as it is now.

Secondly, assignments should be completed with examinations. Assignments at AIMS, as I see them, are mostly perfunctory, and do not play much of a formative role for most students. They could play that formative role, if students knew that the skills they gained from understanding the problem sets in those assignments would be tested in a forum where there were no books, no Internet, and no classmates to turn to.

Thirdly, students' grades should be given to them. At least, privately. Or, the no-grades-until-you-defend policy should be explained to every student during the orientation. The arguments for such a policy should be advanced clearly and cogently, and measures should be taken to assure students that what they get on the final day actually reflect their hard work.

It wouldn’t surprise me if, after reading this review, you came to the conclusion that I was disappointed with the AIMS experience. I wouldn’t entirely refute such an assertion. I had very high hopes about the academic standards of AIMS when I read the fliers, which were not met. However, there were a number of positive things I gained from the experience. For the first time in my academic career, I got to engage with my teachers at a deep level, ask questions, and, most importantly, see them work. I was inspired, seeing accomplished academics, presumably masters of their fields work, day in, day out. Even with the numerous achievements and the positions they have in their respective universities, they have managed to retain the drive and passion for pure science. Their mastery of the subjects, as well as the ability to teach and communicate was simply awe-inspiring. Even then, I was even more inspired by their work ethic. Hardly ever before in my life had I seen such accomplished people work so hard on anything. So, getting that close to such teachers was a highlight of the AIMS experience for me.

The facilities placed at our disposal were also wonderful. Every one of us (the students) had a working computer, with Internet access all the time. Well, except for the few times when there were technical issues with the ISP, but those are all quite normal issues, which are to be expected. It was therefore quite easy to read and do research on any subject of my interest, which was a privilege I could only have had access to had I paid huge sums of money.

I had quite a number of reservations about writing this essay. Particularly, I am worried about being misunderstood, and possibly ostracized for what I have said here. I have done my best to present my opinions as clearly as possible, but I know that there is ample opportunity for misunderstanding. However, I would like to precise that I didn’t have to do this. I have completed the AIMS program, and have no legal obligations towards AIMS. On a purely personal level, I have nothing to gain or lose from whatever fate befalls this institution in the future. However, I respect the mission of AIMS, and care deeply about the program, and Africa’s development in general. I simply did this in the hope that it could contribute to the improvement of the experience for those who become part of AIMS in the future, and that it could also help AIMS achieve its objectives.

Now, it should go without saying that my opinions are subjective, and are strongly influenced by the experiences I had prior to coming to AIMS, academic and otherwise. A number of my mates found AIMS incredibly challenging; they had never had to work so hard in their lives. Some of them didn’t have the necessary mathematical background, and had to work extra hard to keep up with the material presented in class. I did not. That alone would make me an out-lier of some sorts: I think that the program was not challenging enough, neither was it transparent enough. At least not enough to make Einsteins out of us.