Group Flays JAMB’s Shoddy Preparation For 2017 UTME

Group Flays JAMB’s Shoddy Preparation For 2017 UTME

A rights group, the Education Rights Campaign (ERC), has condemned the conduct of the registration exercise in the just concluded 2017 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

ERC in a release listed some of the challenges candidates encountered during the registration excercise to include: congested registration centres and highhandedness of security operatives attached to some of the centre by the body responsible for the test, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB).

The group, in a statement jointly signed by Hassan Taiwo Soweto, National Coordinator and Ibukun Omole, National Secretary, stated that the shoddy conduct of the exercise were indications that the 2017 test will end the way it ended in 2016.

‘The JAMB officialdom has tried to justify this unnecessary hardship as an inevitable consequence of the innovations and reforms it has had to introduce to make the admission process more resistant to manipulation and cheating. We beg to disagree.

“As we have argued severally, so long as the shortage of admission spaces continues to exist, the admission process will remain brutally competitive and as such continue to succumb to malpractice, manipulation and racketeering.

“Therefore, unless the government addresses the problem of shortage of admission spaces by improving funding to the education sector and ensuring that these funds are judiciously used to expand facilities in the existing tertiary institutions while establishing more, no effort to curb examination malpractice and racketeering will succeed,” it said..

The group observed that it continues to beat the imaginations of the right thinking citizens that ‘despite JAMB’s efforts over the years and that of others to address the problem of examination malpractice and admission racketeering, these challenges continue to rise astronomically’.

According to the group, all of these measures put in place to checkmate these maladies have all failed because all efforts to achieve the processes of solving malpractice have been anchored entirely on false assumptions and perspectives.

Government and JAMB erroneously believe that examination malpractice is a crime that can be curbed through the development of tighter controls and monitoring as well as deployment of technology to strengthen the integrity of the examination process.

“This was the reason why the examination body launched the Computer Based Test few years ago. But instead of the CBT reducing examination malpractice, it has been riddled with all kinds of complaints. Especially in the prevailing condition of inadequate computer illiteracy and little or no infrastructure to support it, the CBT has only succeeded in putting the examination process in further chaos.

The underpinning reason for the endemic nature of examination malpractices and admission racketeering remains the inadequate admission spaces in the public universities, polytechnics and colleges of education and the rabid competition this has created in the hearts and minds of admission seekers and parents. Only improved funding and expansion of the carrying capacity of existing tertiary institutions as well as a plan to establish more can begin to eliminate the conditions and motivations for examination malpractice and admission racketeering.

ERC condemned the centralisation of the registration process vested in the hand of JAMB and other vested interest, saying that it had hugely congested the whole process beyond what the examination body can handle.

The release added: “We therefore call for a return to the decentralized process of registration where candidates can freely walk into any cyber cafe to register for UTME with little stress.

It puts the ongoing lapses in the 2017 UTME at the doorstep of the Federal Government and called on education workers’ unions, parents and civil society groups renew the struggle for improved funding of the education sector, democratic control and management of schools.