2021 UTME: JAMB ENUMERATES CHALLENGES AFFECTING SOME OF ITS OPERATIONS

In what seems like a stock-taking of his stewardship, particularly with regard to the recently-conducted 2021 UTME, the Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board(JAMB), Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, has listed challenges militating against the successful delivery of some aspects of the Board's operations.


The Registrar, at a presentation before the Senate Committee on Education, Basic and Secondary, on Monday, 12th July 2021, pointed out that it was not yet Uhuru despite the monumental achievements recorded by the Board, especially, within the period of his stewardship.


He enumerated the myriads of challenges that his leadership had to contend within the course of delivering world-class UTME in the past five years.


According to him, examination malpractice, indiscipline and some parents' intrusive nature of trying to circumvent established norms in connivance with some elite schools remained the major challenges confronting the Board.


He said, “Our challenge remains examination malpractice, especially about some parents whose children are in some of these elite schools who would go to any length to compromise the system. Several times my staff have had cause to pay to government accounts inducements given to them by these parents for them to compromise the process.”


Continuing, he said, "There is also this aspect of some tertiary institutions which admit candidates by circumventing Federal Government’s policy guidelines on admissions.


At the end of the day, after admitting candidates outside the prescribed policy guidelines, they put pressure on those students when graduation is imminent to come back to the Board for what they call ‘regularisation’.“


He further said, "We also have challenges from some dubious Computer-Based Test (CBT) centres which are aiding and abetting examination misconduct but we are not leaving any stone unturned to rid the system of these bad eggs.”


In the same vein, he decried the activities of some security personnel attached to some centres, who during the 2021 UTME, allegedly smuggled professional examination takers, candidates, into some examination halls.


He said, "Unfortunately, for these candidates, even after they dodged the verification process where, of course, the system would have identified them through their details, the CCTV cameras inside the examination hall immediately zeroed in on them and we were able to apprehend them.


That was when some of them confessed to their heinous deeds and revealed that their parents had given the security operatives money to let their 'mercenaries' in while a few asserted that they had bribed their way in themselves."


Prof. Oloyede was, however, upbeat as these challenges and many more had been mostly resolved with the introduction of the National Identification Number (NIN).


The Registrar lauded the introduction of NIN in its 2021 UTME exercise, which he said, had successfully flushed out ‘fake candidates’ from the examination process and greatly curtailed incidences of examination malpractice and impersonation as the 2021 exercise has the least number of malpractice cases ever recorded in the history of the Board.


"Yet another windfall from the introduction of NIN was that the Board was able to get a more realistic figure of candidates' strength.


This is because the number of registered candidates for the 2021 UTME and DE which stood at nearly 1.5m despite all the extensions and the directive that even candidates without NIN should come for capturing, is a more realistic figure compared with the over bloated figure of 2.2 million recorded in 2020.


It should be noted that the figure was obviously fuelled by multiple registrations which, of course, could not be replicated this year,” the Registrar commented.