The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) yesterday formally launched the Computer Based Test (CBT) for 2013 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), in the country. With the development, the body makes it mandatory that all exams must be written on computers.
And because of the inadequacy of computers, JAMB had decided to stagger the exams that used to hold in one day to 17 straight days. Another great innovation coming with the e-JAMB is that every candidate gets his or her score immediately exam is concluded, while the final result comes later.
Flagging off the ceremony in Abuja, the Minister of Education, Professor Ruqqayatu Ahmed Rufa’i said the CBT would eliminate all forms of examination malpractices, ensure prompt delivery of raw scores, eliminate all cases of incomplete result and reduce result blackout.
The minister said the CBT: “Will be to the best interest of our students in the country because it is a system whereby a student will press a button and see his or her score after examination and we are targeting at transforming the education sector between now and 2015 and part of the effort is to look into the quality and access to education.”
The minister also highlighted two other options a student might choose to use if he or she is not computer literate, saying: “If one cannot see on a computer based he may be able to opt for paper pencil test or dual (computer and paper) based test and we are going to allow that between now and 2015 and it is our hope that by 2015 every students must have seen the advantage of using a computer.”
On whether candidates would comply with the mode of the examination, the Executive Secretary of JAMB, Professor Dibu Ojerinde, Said: “If we continue to drag on like this, we will be left behind by the whole world, other countries have started using it, why is Nigeria not doing it, it means there must be a problem and we have to start from the grass root, they must comply because we have tested about 600 students in CHAMS, and they indicated their interest in using it.”
The JAMB boss, while allaying fears of Nigerians over a possible increase in the fee as a result of the new development and how candidates in the rural areas would benefit from the scheme, given the epileptic power supply in the country, as well as the fear that the scheme could be hijacked by contractors, told journalists in an interview that: “For now, the price remains as it used to be, we are not increasing the price. “Secondly, on the issue of infrastructures, we don’t want to be monopolistic in our attitude.
We want to give it to private partners who are ready to work with us. “For example, we have identified a number of tertiary institutions and the minister of education just commissioned the computer based testing of the University of Agriculture, Markudi.
“That place, we have 500 terminals and 500students can sit and take exams at the same time.” He also said “we have some other private establishment like the CHAMS, where they have about one thousand systems and Electronic Testing Company, ETC, which has eight centres with a minimum of 2,000, computers per centres. “But we are not going to do these examination on the same day for everybody.
We start on a day and end up after about 17 days, so that as you do your exams, you get out. You get something telling you how much you have performed. But the final result will come out later.” He said while the board would depend solely on private partnership for the time being, it is making arrangement to build its own computer centres, which was already in progress.
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