THE recent Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) results released by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) have generated a lot of hoopla in the country. While the results showed a very dismal performance that worried stakeholders in the education sector, a new twist was introduced by revelations that a systemic error was also implicated in the results. While commenting on the issue, the Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, said that the mass failure indicated the level of success that the government and the examination bodies had attained in combating examination malpractices. According to him, the trend of malpractices which had become almost indistinguishable from the examination architecture in Nigeria had hitherto disincentivised dedicated students who were dispirited by sharp practices among their colleagues. This, he said, also generally ensured a vitiation of the process of examination in the country, as well as giving undeserved “successes” to students who engaged in examination malpractice. To the minister, the mass failure was a recompense for those in the habit of undermining the place of genuine study in the acquisition of knowledge. He also said that this was part of the measures aimed at insulating other qualifying and transitional examinations in the country from fraud, maintaining that the government would ensure full adoption of technology to guard against malpractices.
The minister made this known while featuring on a national television morning show. He said, “It is a reflection of exams being done the proper way. JAMB conducts its exam using computer-based testing. It has put so much security in place that fraud or cheating has been completely eliminated. Now, we don’t have the same in our other exams, like WAEC and NECO. From November of this year, WAEC and NECO will migrate their exams to computer-based testing. We have to use technology to fight this fraud. People cheat through the secondary school examination system, WAEC and NECO, and then they go and do JAMB (UTME), where they cannot cheat. And that’s the reflection of what we are seeing today. It’s bad. So the ones that are good, you are going to make them bad. And that is what we have to stop completely. Zero tolerance for exam practices in our country.”
The UTME mass failure is indeed very unfortunate. But contrary to the minister’s suggestion for halting the drift in examinations and the quality of education in the country, we submit that the major issue is not strictly about the government fighting examination malpractice. Examination malpractice has been fought for years with varying degrees of success. For instance, the introduction of examination types (Type A, Type B, etc.) through which questions were arranged differently so that candidates could not easily communicate with one another or dictate answers to one another in the examination hall was a novelty aimed at curbing fraud in the UTME examination. The big elephant in the room is the crisis in Nigeria’s education sector which gradually assumed a monstrous status with the passage of time. Sadly, governments had confronted this hydra by injecting placebos instead of concrete policies that would rejig and reshape this critical sector.
The unfortunate equation evident in Nigeria today is that most public schools are not providing real education. Standards in those schools, as against private schools, have dropped phenomenally, so much so that not many parents desire to take their wards to public schools. Experts have blamed this on the government’s uninspiring attitude to education and its fascination with less than qualitative drives in the education sector. Today, public schools are literally run down and most of the time, there are no quality teachers to teach in the available schools. Many of the schools are run without electricity, leading to students in those unfortunate schools not being in tune with smart school requirements. Emerging complaints from the JAMB exams that produced multiple failures have shown that most of the candidates did not have adequate knowledge of the Computer-based Testing (CBT) examinations.
Apart from the government’s ineptitude, it must also be said that the sweeping and pervasive reign of the social media has all but taken the attention of many students away from their studies. Those students are engrossed in the deleterious offerings of the worldwide web. They spend all of their time on the social media, at the detriment of their studies, leading to mass failure in examinations. If the UTME examination was about making salacious posts and telling dry jokes on Tiktok, WhatsApp or X, many of the candidates who flunked this year’s UTME examination would come out in flying colours. This minus should be blamed on parents. The home is seriously wanting in this regard as supervision has gone to the dogs. More often than not, parents spare the rod, a euphemism for degenerate home training. Parents’ counter arguments also revolve round the grim economic stress of this time which leaves them completely overwhelmed and sapped of energy. The result is their inability to help with the processes of their children’s education. In any case, with the country’s poor minimum wage, many parents also cannot afford to send their children to quality schools. To worsen matters, the proprietors of many private schools cannot even afford to hire good teachers who can deliver quality instruction.
There is of course the question of technical failures on the part of JAMB, including the vexing issues of glitches in the examination. Instructively, JAMB has formally admitted responsibility for its errors in this regard, and announced that 379,997 candidates would be given the opportunity to retake the examination. This is a step in the right direction, and we urge the board to invest massively in technology and address the issues decisively so that innocent candidates are not thrown into a tailspin going forward. Still, we submit that addressing mass failure in public examinations requires a holistic approach that aims at redeeming the education sector as a whole. Governments at various levels must revamp the education sector and change the fortunes of students.
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