JAMB exams now fully computer-based

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, said that from next year, its Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, would be fully computer-based.

The board has also prohibited cyber café centres from handling the registration of its candidates for the UTME. JAMB Registrar, Prof. ‘Dibu Ojerinde, disclosed this in Abuja yesterday at a briefing to announce the sale of forms for 2015 edition of the exercise.

The measure, the organisation said, was taken to curtail malpractices in the examination.

JAMB is the agency of the Federal Government which handles admissions of prospective students into tertiary institutions of learning in Nigeria.

The 2015 exercise will be ‘full-blown computer-based test,’ CBT, against the three modes that were written this year, namely Dual- Based Mode, DBT; Computer- Based Test, CBT and Paper-Pencil-Test, PPT.

Ojerinde said sale of the forms for the next exercise would begin on September 15, 2014 and end on Thursday, January 15, 2015.

Application forms are to be purchased at designated banks at N4,500, including additional N500 charged on a newly recommended textbook for the examination.

“The board has fine-tuned arrangements with the CBT centres to register prospective UTME candidates. This became necessary to make the registration error and stress free for candidates. Often times, the Board has discovered that most of the cases of impersonation and other malpractice cases are initiated from the registration process by cyber-cafes and hence the need to regulate the registration process to ensure the system is malpractice free.

“By this arrangement, candidates are to obtain their application document from the designated banks and proceed to any of our CBT centres and register for the examination at a regulated fee. There are about 300 centres all over the country and the centre members of staff have been trained for this purpose,” he said.

Candidates’ performances in JAMB, like other public examinations in the country, have been abysmally poor in recent years; thereby generating public debates on who should be held responsible for such failures.

For instance, 83 per cent (being 844,083 out of 1,015,504) of candidates who sat for the 2014 edition of JAMB’s DBT and PPT scored below 200. The examination had a cumulative mark of 400.

Results from 2014 CBT however showed that candidates earned higher scores than DBT and PPT; but its full introduction in a nation where computer literacy is still very low has been subjected to questioning.

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