Why 2019 UTME is the Most Successful - JAMB Speaks

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The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB Discloses the Reasons why 2019 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME was the Most Successful ever Conducted.

The 2019 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) may have come and gone but the memories are still fresh in our minds.

The UTME is a matriculation examination that kicks- starts the journey of an average Nigerian secondary school leaver to tertiary education.

Success in the UTME is one of the most important criteria for gaining admission into tertiary institutions in Nigeria and this underscores the importance of this entry examination as well as the desperation from some quarters to compromise examination officials and procedures.

Preparatory to the UTME, the Board held series of meetings with service providers, the banks and other stakeholders in the build up to the sales of application documents and the introduction of a number of innovations with a view to having a seamless registration exercise.

As part of the resolutions of the various critical stakeholders’ meetings, strategies were fine-tuned to guide the Board's strategic planning and preparation for the supervision and administration of the examination of the 2019 UTME.

In one of the meetings held in Abuja, the Registrar, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, apprised members of the numerous innovations put in place for the 2019 UTME.

The meeting also provided insights into the activities of the various strategic committees set up by the Board and afforded members the opportunity to exchange ideas and share information.

It should be noted that the work of the various committees was facilitated by the reports and complaints obtained by Technical Officers and other field workers in previous years.

The Board equally conducted a forensic study of the existing and new Computer-Based Test (CBT) centres in order to certify and revalidate them in readiness for the 2019 UTME.

In the course of the study, network tests otherwise called LINK tests were conducted all in a bid to have a hitch- free examination.

As such, when challenges began to manifest during examinations, solutions guided by past experiences were immediately proffered and the exercise was promptly brought back on track.

This is one of the reasons the Board has recorded one of its most successful outings since inception.

The main catch that lends credence to this year's examination as the most successful is the uncovering of the age- long method used by examination writers’ syndicates specializing in multiple registrations.

These syndicates have perfected the art of impersonating willing candidates, who paid a lot of money to them to sit the examination on behalf of the candidates.

Another success indicator was the discovery of some elite schools whose owners mutilate their candidates' data to compromise the process.

Those and many of such revelations in the 2019 UTME make the examination unique as the most successful examination in the annals of the Board.

The efforts of the Board in sanitizing the conduct of large-scale examinations in Nigeria recorded a boost with the large number of fraudsters arrested and handed over to security agencies for prosecution.

In achieving these landmark achievements, technology has been of immense assistance especially in unmasking these imposters who had for long compromised the sanctity of the Board's examinations.

As a result of these discoveries, it is clear that it is not going to be business as usual as far as the conduct of public examination in Nigeria is concerned.

These efforts of the Board did not go unnoticed as a former Minister of Education, Mrs. Nora Chinwe Obaji declared shortly after a tour of some CBT centres in Nasarawa and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, that the Board has improved considerably in the conduct of its UTME. Mrs. Obaji said, "The use of computer for the conduct of the CBT has turned out not to be a complex operation as the Board has simplified the test-taking process through the introduction of nine keys without a mouse.

As such, all a candidate needs to do is to punch the right key pertaining to the candidate's choice.”