OPINION: Open Letter To JAMB Registrar

To start with, who do we blame for the mass failure we have experienced in the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination of 2024 and 2025? Do we blame only our children, who may not have put in their best to make their parents proud and feel satisfied that the sweat of what they might have laboured on their wards is not in vain, or do we blame the examiner for failure to live up to expectations by providing the correct and necessary materials for the students to adequately prepare for the examinations?

That less than 25 per cent of the students who sat for the examinations crossed the borderline of 200 to 400; the total aggregate is an abysmal failure for both the students and the examiner (JAMB).

In other words, that fewer than 400,000 students out of more than 1.9 million students who registered for the examination got above 200 is a colossal failure, and who do we blame for this, if not the students and the examiner, JAMB?

The question is: Is the examiner, JAMB, truly making available the right materials for the students to adequately prepare for the examinations?

Equally so, is the JAMB ensuring the integrity of the examination is intact so as to make sure the examination is transparent in order to cast out any kind of suspicion that the examination is being manipulated by the Board?
This is not to cast aspersion, but people may be doubting the integrity of the examination because, in a digital age (information technology), why can’t the students get the final result of their examinations immediately after they click on the word ‘submit’ after they have finished their exams?

How come they have to wait for days when, in a digital age, the system can be programmed for the students to immediately have their results at hand, at the click of the word ‘submit’, as it has been practised in the United States and other countries? It is on record that students got their results immediately in the mock exams that were conducted by the same JAMB. Why can’t we have the same practice in the final exams, or is it not the same system JAMB is using to conduct both the mock and the final examinations? Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, what’s up with that?

What about the glitches that many of the students are made to experience during the examinations, which have already set some of them up for outright failure? Can JAMB do the needful to fix the issue of computer glitches to a very insignificant percentage, because nothing can be 100 per cent perfect? Yes, we give room for inevitable human error.

One of the greatest challenges that many of the students face is the inability of the Board to set a timeline and exam centres that are suitable for many of our children.

How do you explain setting exams for 6:30 am when you have to travel from your home in Festac Town to faraway Badagry to take your exams? It should be noted that from Festac Town to Badagry in Lagos State is 31.4 miles, and it is 1 hour and 24 minutes travelling time. Is this proximity good enough to catch up with the traffic gridlock in Lagos State? How do we reconcile this with the rising surge of insecurity across the country?

Methinks setting exam times for 6:30 am in Nigeria today is very absurd. Is JAMB not already setting up the students for failure before writing the examinations? This is because the stress and fear of getting to the exam centre to meet up with the rules and regulations of taking the examination, as set up by JAMB, are psychologically stressful enough, with effects that may affect the function of the brain. It may make your memory go blank for the examination that is supposed to be conducted in a conducive environment, including logistics and transportation.

Is JAMB truly doing enough to consider the welfare of our children to meet the end goals, which is to develop human capacity towards nation building, or is the examination more important than our children that JAMB cannot make the proximity to the examination centres from the students’ homes not more than 6 miles for all students and also stop setting exams for 6:30 am in a country where the security level is at high risk?

Suffice it to say, the duration of time to take the examinations is less than 3 hrs with an additional 2 hrs to run the biometric and establish the identity of each candidate for the exam, 5 hrs in total. Prof. Oloyede, I would like to suggest that JAMB should seriously consider my suggestion that future examination times for students should allow for them to be at the centre, not be earlier than 9 am.

Sir, this institution that you are currently steering the leadership of as the registrar is one of the pillars of our ideological foundation that sustains, maintains, strengthens and develops our tertiary institutions towards building a superstructure for true nation building and given the abysmal failures in both 2024 and 2025, the urgent need to re-engineer the board and change the trajectory for our children to perform credibly well in the future JAMB, at least to have nothing less than fifty per cent performance, cannot be overemphasised.

So far, your performance as the Registrar of JAMB is quite encouraging with some of the new innovations like biometrics, digital devices for testing, financial accountability and probity and others.
However, these are just means to an end; the means must justify the end. Nigerians are not satisfied or happy with a result that only has less than 25 per cent of their children that sat for the 2025 UTME crossing the threshold of 200, over a total aggregate of 400.

It is high time you bring all stakeholders, including educators, the Ministry of Education, School Proprietors, the Parent Teachers Association, IT experts and all other relevant bodies together to brainstorm on how best to tackle the abysmal failures we have had in the past two years, 2024 and 2025

In conclusion, as the Registrar of JAMB, nothing is better than a legacy of crossing the threshold of fifty per cent scorecard in the future UTME.
Sir, you now have a benchmark as provoked from the womb of public opinion. Thanks.

May Allah, the Beneficent and the Merciful, grant you favour to live a life of good legacy. Amen.

– David Adeyinka Adenekan is the editor of Shekinah International Magazine and a media consultant. He is also the secretary of Afenifere Diaspora USA.
davidadenekan5@gmail.com.

OPINION: Open Letter To JAMB Registrar is first published on The Whistler Newspaper