A JAMBoree of confusion

Registration for the 2017 tertiary institutions placement test, overseen by the Joint Admissions & Matriculation Board (JAMB), has gone awry and suddenly puts to shame the agency’s nearly 40 years of experience on the job. Despite projecting that over 1.7million candidates will write this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), JAMB’s new management prevaricated for more than five months before announcing sale of registration forms. Curiously, the Agency imposed a 23-day deadline for registration. When the confusion from this exercise clears, JAMB’s new chief executive, Prof. Is’haq Oloyede, may be exposed as an administrator who dismantled a tested structure without installing a robust replacement. Oloyede’s manic overhaul restricts to three the number of banks selling registration forms, promotes new computer-based test (CBT) centres whose locations candidates are unable to access on the JAMB portal, and deploys an intricate PIN-acquisition process that has candidates rushing from banks to CBTs and back, to beat the deadline. Amidst this confusion, when more than half of prospective candidates have yet to register, JAMB went ahead and conduct a mock examination!

Was there any point to the overhaul in the first place?

We find three positive outcomes of the exercise, following from the candidate instructions issued by JAMB. Candidates who desire to study in polytechnics or colleges of education can now adopt them as first-choice institution, rather than the previous restriction on candidates to make a university their first choice. Second, JAMB hopefully solves the paper-based test challenge by migrating every candidate to computer-based and configuring the system to use only a set of keys to input answers rather than fiddle with the mouse which neophytes find challenging. Mindful of the damage that registration delays have done to the process, JAMB aligned UTME test dates with the timetable of the West African School Certificate Examination (WASCE) to avoid conflicts for students writing both examinations. Beyond these three glimmers of thoughtfulness, however, the 2017 UTME registration process has been anything but spectacular.

Prof. Oloyede could have allowed this year’s examination to pass before inaugurating his pet ideas. Overall, we find no useful purpose served by his eagerness to dismantle a process that works and replace it with one that does not. He simply set out to lead a jamboree of confusion rather than provide order, convenience and comfort for which the agency was set up; JAMB is currently wasting man-hours, creating needless anxiety for students writing WASCE, and tasking police and other security officials attempting to manage the confusion but making a poor job of it.Is it any surprise that members of the new management are spending days and nights in the office to clear the self-inflicted mess?

We view this avoidable confusion as a product of inexperience and lack of attention to professionalism. The registration process is symptomatic of a national malaise where incoming managers – and workers as well – often proceed as if they have been called upon to manage a start-up, rather than a going concern. We hope that the management will also learn that materialism is often an enemy of professionalism; it won’t be long before the public focuses on the N1.19billion that CBTs stand to take home when JAMB meets its 2017 registration projections – as well as the N9.35billion that the Agency will gross from the exercise. Rather than focus on this money (which has become a pastime for many MDAs), it might be better to begin to think of what to do with three-quarters of JAMB candidates who are routinely shut out of the admission process after each test cycle, for lack of spaces in local tertiary institutions.