Director charges JAMB, other examination bodies on credible testing parameters

Hajia Hindatu Abdullahi, the Director , Tertiary Education, Federal Ministry of Education has urged JAMB and other public examination bodies to adopt credible parameters to obtain true assessment of candidates’ abilities.

Abdullahi who spoke on Wednesday in Bwari, FCT, at the beginning of a one-week training workshop on international benchmark on item banking, stressed the need to conduct credible examinations.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the workshop was organised by the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) and the Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB).

Abdullahi said that public examination bodies must conduct credible assessments with a view to producing valid and reliable results that can stand the test of time.

According to her, results of examinations conducted by public examination bodies such as JAMB and UNEB are necessary for decision making, and therefore should be credible.

Abdullahi said such public examination bodies should engage electronic item banking in order to produce reliable results.

She defined item bank as term used for the repository of test of items that belong to a testing programme, as well as information pertaining to those items.

The director also advised examination bodies to use “electronic item banking,’’ in order to achieve the desired results.

She said that electronic item banking “is cost-effective, ensures examination security, and saves time and energy over conventional test development processes.”

The director commended JAMB for refining higher education in Nigeria, with the deployment of its Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), via the Computer Based Test (CBT).

JAMB Registrar Prof. Dibu Ojerinde, who spoke said item bank training sought to ensure improvement in the conduct of examinations.

He described item banking as the process of collecting a number of regulated items into a system, either electronically or in analogue manner, to create multiple choices used to examine candidates.

Ojerinde said: “It is the idea of giving the exam candidates what they truly deserve.

“For example, in the CBT, I will sit and you will sit for it, but our number one questions are not the same.
“If you give one candidate a very tough item and you give another candidate a simple one, it will be imbalance.

“Therefore, we must give public examination candidates items that have the same difficult ability level, to be able to derive equal psychological basis.”

The one-week training workshop would end on Nov. 28.