Nigeria: Improving Conduct of Matriculation Exams 2011/2012

This year's Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) took place on Saturday June 18, with over one million candidates in various centres across the country sitting for it. Like in previous years, the examination was not without bottlenecks. The UTME, which was due to commence at 9am only started in many centres at about an hour behind schedule. The delay was attributed to the very slow rate at which the newly-introduced biometric machines deployed to verify candidates' fingerprints and check other forms of malpractices were responding to operational tasks. In some instances, the use of the machines had to be abandoned to save time.

The Registrar of Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Professor Dibu Ojerinde blamed the hitch partly on the late start of the screening of candidates by examination officers. While explaining the problem encountered with the biometric machines, Ojerinde stated that the number of candidates whose data were in each of the systems was 540, too much for machines' memory capacity to handle. However, the machines proved their utility, before they were discarded, helping officials to discover and turn away candidates with fraudulent registrations from writing the examination; thereby reducing the incidence of examination malpractices. This means that with improvements in their capacities, the machines should be good aids in the fight against frauds in examinations.

By the time the use of biometric machine is perfected, JAMB would have conquered two of the several crooked avenues used by examination fraudsters. JAMB recorded the first success in reducing the incidence of examination malpractice in May 2008, when it released results of the examination ten days after it was written, greatly curtailing the chances of dubious JAMB and examination officials exploiting the long period of processing the results to perpetrate corrupt practices including the marketing of scores. Such actions that devalue the credibility of public examinations prompted the introduction of a second level of screening, the Post-UME examination by universities, in 2005. This second screening test is to give candidates the opportunity to defend their UTME scores.

This year, JAMB has improved further by releasing the results within one week of the examination. Results of the 2011 UTME were released on June 24, 2011. While giving details of this year's results, Professor Ojerinde declared that out of the 1, 493, 000 candidates that sat for the UTME, 7,504 results were withheld, pending investigation. He added that about 15,160 cases of various forms of examination malpractice as well as 28,069 cases were recorded. The University of Lagos received the highest number of applicants with 99,195 but can only admit 9,507 candidates. Ahmadu Bello University Zaria and the University of Nigeria Nsukka followed with 89,760 and 88,177 applicants respectively, both having limited admission vacancies.

There are other areas where JAMB needs to work out strategies to fight the frightening trend of examination malpractice. Some parents, for instance, cannot avoid blame for abetting malpractices among candidates. Some hire mercenaries to write the UTME for their children or wards. Equally disturbing is the situation where examination halls are often overcrowded with candidates, but insufficient number of invigilators to effectively watch over them. These conditions create the environment for lazy candidates to exploit with impunity.
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JAMB should limit the number of candidates in each examination hall to manageable number, with a reasonable number of invigilators and reject any demand for concessional posting of examination officers. Parents must stop financing the purchase of live UTME question papers or hiring mercenaries to write examinations for their children. They should rather encourage their wards to imbibe the virtue of hard work by reading their books. Candidates should be patient and meticulous in filling their examination forms in order not to fall foul of requirement of the biometric machines.

If JAMB can overcome some of the failures of the past through the use of biometric machine in the conduct of its examination, this would restore the confidence in the UTME results, and, down the road, render the conduct of Post-UTME superfluous. The success of the machines should encourage other examination bodies, pension boards and electoral commissions in the country to consider adopting them for use in their operations to check fraudulent practices.