I got text awarding me 40 marks for JAMB exam i didn’t write, says Ishaku

Miss Faith Ishaku is a 2016 UTME-JAMB candidate who could not make it to the university and she felt bad about it. She spoke with The Guardian in Jos, the Plateau State capital.

According to her: “I can describe this year’s JAMB examination as one of the worst ever organised examinations compared to the previous ones.”

“I registered in October 2015 for the UTME and a centre was given to me at the Plateau State Polytechnic, Jos Campus. On the date of the examination, I was informed that the exam would no longer hold at that centre. Two days after, I got a text message that my centre had been changed to the Federal College of Forestry, Jos and the date in that text indicated that the examinations had been written a day earlier.

So, that was how I missed the examination. But after three days, I got another text message that I had been given 40 marks. This is for an examination that I did not attend not to talk of writing it. I felt embarrassed.”

Faith also narrated the experience of her friend who wrote her examination in one of the centres.

“After the examination, she printed out the result at a business centre and was given a score of 195. Few days later, she got a text message from JAMB that her examination score was 150. She was in a fix. She did not know which score was authentic.”

A stakeholder and a father of many children who passed through JAMB and are now comfortable in the university, Mr. Ishaku Joshua, said that he has come to discover that JAMB really has many challenges as the only authorised examination body in the country conducting examinations into tertiary institutions.

According to Joshua: “The challenges range from inadequate facilities in the examination centres like computers, standby generating sets, manpower and network problems which invariably affect innocent candidates during the examination.”

He said that the unfortunate development is that JAMB is an examination being conducted once in a year. “This means that a student who does not have the cut–off mark will have to wait again for another year.  For me, as a stakeholder, I will suggest that JAMB should support the debate at the National Assembly which is trying to legalise the JAMB results and make the lifespan three years instead of writing it every year. JAMB should have a human face and extend its result to three years in order to reduce the scrambling of candidates and again it will enable JAMB to prepare very well for any examination.”

He also advised JAMB to improve on its security network on the website so that results are not arbitrarily dished out to some students rather than those who wrote and merited the results.