JAMB: Will the examination body get it right this time?

This Saturday, the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board, JAMB, will hold its Unified Tertiary Examination, UMTE throughout the country.

No doubt the over 1. 5 million candidates are intensifying efforts to excel in the examination. However, going by past records, the examination has always been bogged down by challenges, such as infrastructure, late arrival of materials, among other hitches.

Already, JAMB, according to its Registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, has conducted a MOCK examination, which he said, was to “Test run the new technology infrastructure” in its (JAMB) fold.
The road to this year’s examination has been rough for the candidates. Stories spread like wild fire about the hardships that confront young admission seekers into the nation’s higher institutions of learning in the course of registration for the UTME.

The loud hisses, the long faces, the fights on queues and the sea of heads tell a part of the story. But four weeks into the registration that generated hoopla across the country, normalcy soon returned to registration centres across the country, going by the reports from Lagos, Ogun, Delta and other parts of the country.
It would be recalled that owing to the hardship and stress experienced by candidates in the course of registration, JAMB had earlier suspended mock examinations, which, according to the JAMB registrar, was meant to familiarize candidates with the Computer-Based Test system and forecast the challenges that may be faced ahead with a view to tackling them.

To encourage candidates’ participation in the UTME mock examination, the spokesperson of JAMB, Fabian Benjamin, had said making the examination free was part of the Corporate Social Responsibility of the board.

Fabian noted, ‘‘we sent information earlier enough that candidate should not pay N700 for the UTME mock examination fee. In the event of any candidate paying, we will ensure refund. We also instructed the CBT centres not to collect money from any candidate.’’

Despite the directive that CBT centres should not charge any fee, investigation by our correspondents in Lagos, Ogun, Delta, Edo states and other parts of the country reveal that candidates part with N700 for registration and the stress and hassle associated with registration at the initial stage may have vanished.

For instance, Evelyn Ire(not real name),a candidate that was seen at the Agidingbi centre, told Daily Times that, ‘‘ I created my created my profile today. I also got my PIN from my bank today, and all didn’t take me much time. I’m here now to conclude the process of registration. Asked if she paid any fee for registration, she said, ‘‘Of course, we can’t register without paying. Before coming here, I knew I was going to pay N700 and I actually paid.

Also, another candidate, Babatunde Anjorin (not real name), confirmed payment of N700 for registration. Babatunde narrates his experience: “The entire process was hell. Those that are registering now are very lucky. They didn’t experience the hardship we passed through. I remember creating a profile alone took me a week. And another one week to get my PIN in the bank.

Speaking on the reported directive from JAMB that candidates should not pay at CBT centres, Anjorin said, ‘‘I’m not aware that there is any directive that candidates should not pay. I registered at a centre in Abeokuta and I paid N700.

But an official of JAMB at the Agidingbi centre, who pleaded anonymity, says the fee charged is not strange, claiming the head office knows about it. His words: “It’s a normal charge. Nobody has ordered us not to collect money for registration. They are aware that we collect it.”
On why there was so much challenge at the outset, he said, ‘‘it would not be true to stand here and say we didn’t have our challenges, and that necessitated a shift in the time table of the exam in order to be fair to all and we are getting results.

But the candidates also cause a number of problems for themselves. For instance, some of them did not follow simple instructions or procedure for registration. There are also people who run coaching centres that demand as high as N8500 and N10 000 to register their candidates. And most times, the whole thing is flawed and after getting their fingers burnt they run back to us to begin the process of registration all over again.

Meanwhile, academics, parents and other stakeholders have advocated that some of the duties of JAMB be returned to the institutions from which they were taken in the days of the military owing to the burgeoning population of students and universities and absence of the needed infrastructure by the board to deal with its challenges, which they claim have become a recurring decimal.

According to JAMB registrar, Oloyede, 1.7 million students are expected to sit for the UTME, which will now begin on May 13, 2017.

Indeed, students, parents and other stakeholders across the country are upbeat that JAMB will get it right this time.