JAMB Has Admitted Blame, Now What?

After a protracted silence interspersed with tacit gaslighting, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, the organization tasked with organizing the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Exam, UTME, has finally admitted culpability in the widespread complaints from students and guardians across the country of inscrutably low scores. Previously, the organization had hailed the just-concluded exams as one of the most successful in history and framed the historic mass failure this year as evidence of its increased success in curbing examination malpractice and question leaks. This narrative rang hollow in the wake of widespread complaints of glitches during the two weeks the exams lasted. In the days following the official release of the results, parents, students, educational professionals, as well as well-meaning Nigerians, in an awe-inspiring show of solidarity, jointly petitioned JAMB to investigate these claims and offer remedial measures. 

While JAMB’s admission of culpability has provided closure and relief to many of the affected students, as well as everyday Nigerians who fervently championed the cause, this entire incident raises more questions than answers. It’s important to note that the examinations took place over two weeks, and in that period, thousands of students, across hundreds of centers, had complained of glitches—being logged out before the stipulated time, incomplete options—and yet, the organization kept mute to the public, and even made pointed efforts to undermine the complaints of the affected students. Only until the complaints reached a fever pitch—it became inescapable on both social media and traditional media—did the examination board begrudgingly convene a board to confirm what they already knew: the record failure was in part due to these glitches in their system. 

One can therefore surmise that if we hadn’t exerted pressure on them to investigate these complaints, absolutely nothing would have been done. Thousands of students who took great pains to prepare for the exam, some of whom had to travel across state or district lines to the far-flung centers they were posted to, would have had no choice but to make peace with the ridiculously low scores JAMB foisted onto them. This reality is both frightening and depressing. 

2016, the year I graduated secondary school, marked the first anniversary of JAMB transitioning from a paper and pencil-based test (PPT) to the now standard Computer-Based Test (CBT). The exams that year were mired in technical difficulties and organizational lapses. There were widespread reports of power outages in some centers, which caused the systems to automatically submit the exams of some students. Questions were riddled with errors. Some students were routed to the wrong venues due to errors on JAMB’s website. It was a terrible mess, an obvious shit show. Many of my peers who took the examination, a lot of them bright students with a demonstrated record of academic excellence, scored so poorly in the examinations that parents, the school’s administrators, and the students themselves were left so confused. Months and years of preparation had gone to waste. Many of these students had aced other examinations like the West African School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) and the Standard Aptitude Test (SAT). The problem, these students figured, lay with JAMB’s wonky system, but they had no way of proving it, and a lot of them had to retake the test the following year. 

In a twisted sense, our success in pressuring the JAMB to investigate the errors of this year’s exam and finally offer remedial measures, however flawed these measures are, is a testament to the power of collectively advocating for change. In Nigeria’s despondent situation, this seemingly small win provides hope that if we stand together in unity, perhaps we can wrest control of our nation from the despots who are currently running it aground. 

Wading through the official press release from JAMB offers many reasons for concern. The document’s title, Man Proposes, God Disposes! (this is not satire, that’s the actual title), hints at the equivocal verbiage that underpins the press release. The long-winded document tries its best to acknowledge the reality of the glitches while removing all responsibility from the organizers. “I can assure you that we scale all heights, fathom all depths, and traverse all horizons to ascertain that quality assurance mechanisms permeate all our operations from the takeoff point to the finish line. We burn the midnight oil and we set our standards high,” the document reads. Is-haq Olanrewaju Oloyede, JAMB’s registrar, frames the organization’s mistakes, which have caused immeasurable anguish to thousands, as an inexorable disaster, as though it were an earthquake or a tsunami; Man Proposes, God Disposes! 

But the press release falters in that, despite its pointed aim of removing blame from the organizers, it unwittingly betrays the depth of their ineptitude. In the press release, Oloyede admits that in the weeks leading up to the examination, they had experienced technical issues with the new “single-item based” format they were implementing, but that “a day before the examinations and everything seemed to be okay.” The entire rhetoric reeks of carelessness. What is most disturbing however, is that in the document, despite his claims of being unaware of the glitches before the audit conducted after the examinations, Oloyede unwittingly admits to issuing directives to “service providers”, which went unheeded, to correct for a “glitch” which affected almost four hundred thousand students. “In clear terms, in the process of rectifying the issue, the technical personnel deployed by the Service Provider for LAG (Lagos and South-East zones) inadvertently failed to update some of the delivery servers.”

The results of almost four hundred thousand students, by their count, were compromised, and yet Prof. Oloyede approved the release of the results, notwithstanding the injustice of it all or the anguish it would cause the students involved. There’s no reason why he should still have the job. And if he’s unwilling to do the honorable thing by resigning in penitence, then the responsibility falls on the Minister of Education, Dr. Maruf Alausa, to right this wrong. JAMB has for a long time been mired in disrepair, and the debacle of the past few weeks is a glaring call for reform. Somewhere in that ominous press release, Prof. Oloyede makes mention of making “grading adjustments” to the exams written on the first day of the exams. This initially seems like a passing remark, but upon closer inspection, things begin to get worrisome.

What happened was that they caught wind of the “glitches” that happened that Friday, and without divulging any details to the public, they unilaterally administered “grading adjustments” to that batch of students. How does one even begin to adjust grades that were distorted by technical errors in the system? Did they add a blanket score to all the affected students? How did they adjust these grades? This raises serious questions around the opaqueness of JAMB’s process. How does JAMB mark and grade students? There’s no reason students cannot get a printout of their answers after the exam. 

There’s also the point of the organization being hyper-fixated  on revenue generation at the expense of its students. Last year, the organization generated N22 billion and remitted N6 billion to the Federal Government. This makes zero sense. Revenue generation for the Federal Government falls outside its scope. The obscene amount of money the agency generates every year simply means students are being overcharged. 

There’s a Nigerian tendency to quickly move on from incidents that would be considered wildly disgraceful in other climes. After all, what’s a botched UTME in a country where snakes devour millions of Naira? This is, however, a clear call for reform. We should all be lauded for forcing JAMB into admitting their mistakes and rescheduling the affected students for new dates. But this just the start, the agency is in a deep state of dereliction, and for the sake of the millions who will be funneled through its system in the coming years, it’s our responsibility to keep up the pressure until holistic change sweeps through the agency, starting with the sack of its current leadership and a pledge towards improved transparency.