JAMB’S initiative on exam fraud

THE Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) is reportedly embarking on an initiative that will soon expose mercenaries who write the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) for candidates. The national examination body plans to check the records of the tertiary institutions for which it conducts the UTME exam in the past 10 years in order to fish out mercenaries and compile and publish their names in a naming and shaming exercise. Some of the exam fraudsters are known to have impersonated as undergraduates while some engaged in the criminal and morally reprehensible act when they were already graduates. They allegedly used different names but the same fingerprints, which hopefully will make their apprehension relatively simple.  This is commendable. There is a sense in which JAMB under its current leadership comes across as a serious national institution, especially as regarding issues of transparency and accountability in financial matters, and now the fidelity and legitimacy of the UTME examination.

The conduct of the UTME has continued to be assailed by myriads of irregularities, including but not limited to knowledge by some candidates of the examination questions before the examination date, compromise by some private computer centre operators used by the examining body for its computer-based tests  (CBT) and the escalating incidence of impersonators. JAMB is on record to have sanctioned many erring CBT centres, strengthened its internal control mechanisms to block leakage of examination questions, and arrested many mercenaries. The proposed initiative of going back in time to identify exam fraudsters and sanction them appropriately, if it succeeds, promises to significantly rein in examination malpractices and confer legitimacy on the exams conducted within the system. Hardly will any discerning and dispassionate observer be surprised by the country’s tales of woe because a society that is permissive of various shades of decadence cannot possibly beget honest persons and decent institutions in the required measure. The point we are making is that the situation that prompted JAMB’s initiative is reflective of the rot in a society where accomplishments by cheating rather than industry have become more or less the norm.

• 2019 UTME results still under scrutiny ― JAMB

It is nonetheless hoped that the same level of discipline that JAMB exercised to achieve salutary financial accountability and transparency in its hitherto opaque system will be brought to bear on the present task of sanitising its examination process and ensuring the fidelity of its outcomes. However, JAMB must brace up to the challenges that lie ahead, some of which are somewhat external to it. For instance, there is concern about the coordination of record keeping between it and tertiary institutions. The question has been asked time and again as to why students admitted to various institutions of higher learning through JAMB still need to fill forms and carry out other rigorous documentation exercises when they already did so in the UTME.  Would it not have been more appropriate for the tertiary institutions to obtain photographs and other documents of their intakes from JAMB in the first place?  Added to this is the poor record keeping culture in this clime. Will the pictures of students who graduated 10 years ago, for instance, still be in good condition if indeed they are still available? These and many more are potential obstacles that JAMB should advert its mind to and find ways to obviate.

Clearly, for JAMB’s initiative to succeed, it needs government’s unqualified support and the buy-in of the universities, colleges of education and polytechnics. Government should lend overt support to the board’s initiative to stamp out malpractices in the UTME. It should be officially mandatory for all the tertiary institutions to cooperate fully with JAMB and make their students’ records available to it for scrutiny. The misgivings anyone may have about their quality notwithstanding, graduates of Nigeria’s tertiary institutions constitute the bulk of the critical human capital in the public and private sectors of the economy. Thus, any effort geared towards general quality assurance of the students and graduates of those institutions should be encouraged and supported by all.

The issues involved in the current crusade are really fundamental as mercenaries and their beneficiaries are a pernicious evil, especially if and when they find their way into the work place. Having mastered and perfected  the act of cutting corners and pursuing crooked ways to achieve  seeming success early in life, they would definitely carry the same mindset  to the work place, perpetrating all manners of heists and sleaze that have the potential to negatively impact governance both in the public and private sectors. It is therefore in the common interest of all to curb the activities of such unscrupulous persons.

We salute JAMB’s courage in embarking on the laudable initiative. We urge it to give all it takes to achieve the objective it has set for itself and endeavour to give feedback to the public as it journeys along.