ABSTRACT

The study examined the relationship between insecurity and assessment practices in universities in Abia State. Two research questions and two hypotheses guided the study. The study adopted correlation research design. The population of the study was made up of 14,963 final year students in the two public universities in Abia State. A sample of 372 students from two universities were used for this study. This sample size was determined by cluster random sampling techniques. The instruments for data collection were: sets of researcher-constructed rating scales titled Insecurity Rating Scale (IRS), Lecturers Instructional Assessment Procedure Scale (LIAPS) and Students' Test Taking Practice Scale (STTPS). The rating scales were validated by three specialists in Educational Measurement and Evaluation for face and content validity before administering it to the respondents. The reliability of the instruments were established at 0.76, 0.78 and 0.77 for IRS, LIAPS and STTPS respectively using Cronbach alpha statistic. The research questions were answered with Pearson (r) statistic while the hypotheses were tested with ttest of significance of simple linear correlation at 0.05 level of significance. It was found among others that there is a very low correlation between insecurity and assessment practices in universities in Abia State. This indicates that as insecurity increases, assessment practices decreases in universities, showing a converse link between the variables. It was recommended that since insecurity negatively affects assessment in universities, the state and federal government should ensure that security officers are provided in the universities so as to improve Lecturers instructional assessment.