• Board spends N750m on CSR to varsities
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has said it had remitted N50 billion to Federal Government’s coffers in the last six years.
The examination body also said it expended N500 million as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in support of Nigerian universities to increase their capacity to give admission to applicants every year in the last five years.
The JAMB Registrar, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, announced this yesterday in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, while delivering a special public lecture, titled: The Imperatives of JAMB in Tertiary Education in Nigeria, as part of activities marking this year’s Gbagura Day.
He added that the board increased the CSR to N750 million this year.
Oloyede said: “The recent strategic and structural innovations in JAMB have resulted in significant impacts on the board in many areas, such as cost control, prevention of financial leakages, and minimisation of financial corruption.
“This has changed the narrative such that JAMB now posts humongous returns to the Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF). The board also expanded internal capacities for its operations with direct execution of processes and procedures.
“Currently, over N50 billion has been recorded as surplus in the past five years. Over N29 billion of this has been returned directly to the CRF. About N11 billion disbursed on capital projects, Corporate Social Responsibility, savings (about N6 billion) and others in contrasts to about N52 million that had been the cumulative return of the previous 40 years.”
Oloyede cited these as some of the reasons to justify the importance of JAMB, including its primary function of conducting examinations for applicants seeking admission into tertiary institutions to ensure fairness, national unity and merit in the process.
He berated those calling for an extension of validity of results of the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME) of candidates, saying those behind the calls were acting in ignorance.
The JAMB registrar explained that a score that is good enough for a year may never be good enough for any subsequent year with more brilliant candidates, owing to the limited carrying capacity.
According to him, increasing the validity period will further compound the huge backlog of untreated admission requests and subscriptions into various institutions in the country.
“In recent times, some people have agitated for the retention of the results of the UTME for more than a year. But let us be clear on this. The validity of a purposeful examination as the UTME cannot be extended beyond the purpose for which it has been administered. Thus, the score of such an examination cannot be banked for future use, as done with Certification Test.
“Other reasons why UTME scores cannot be banked and its validity cannot be extended beyond a year include: each year’s examination has different standard in terms of test difficulty and comparability since a norm-referenced test is linked only to the test population of a particular year.
“The psychometrics for comparability demands a statistical procedure of linking and equating the mean, standard deviation and rank order of performance scores to be approximately the same for each validity year.
“This statistical factor must be equated in each year’s performance for adjustment and defensibility to the critical stakeholders on national combined selection; the purpose of the UTME is to align it with the current Year One (100 level) syllabus of tertiary institutions.
“Change in syllabus may affect the validity and reliability of scores for candidates for different years. If fresh school leavers are to wait for all the earlier-school leavers to be admitted before they (the fresh) are considered, then the fresh ones would be unduly deprived even if they are more qualified than the earlier set.
“The standard for each cohort is to take the best available each year rather than rank on age of test; admission in a given year depends on the carrying capacity of an institution and the performance of candidates at the examination, viz-a-vis their chosen courses and programmes. Other parameters for admission, such as Merit, Catchment Area, Educationally Less Developed States (ELDS), state of origin, also play significant role.
“A score that is good enough for a year may never be good enough for any subsequent year with more brilliant candidates; owing to the limited carrying capacity, increasing the validity period will further compound the huge backlog of untreated admission requests and subscriptions to various institutions,” Oloyede said.