Augustine Okezie
The federal government has urged all examination bodies in the country to emulate the newly introduced biometric computer based test (CBT), by the joint admissions and matriculation board (JAMB), as part of the measures designed to eliminate examination malpractices and promote efficiency in the handling of examination results.
Permanent Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Education, Dr. Mark-John Nwaobiala, who represented the Supervising Minister of Education, Barrister Nyeso Wike, during the monitoring of the conduct of CBT examination, on Saturday in Bwari, in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), said: “I encourage examination bodies to emulate what JAMB is doing. You can literally feel the atmosphere. The process is very efficient and capable of eliminating examination malpractices. Government will further assist JAMB develop more infrastructures for efficient conduct of CBT examinations.”
Registrar of JAMB, Prof. Dibu Ojerinde, in his remarks, said staggering the CBT examination was deliberately designed to eliminate wastes and accommodate all challenges usually anticipated in any computer based examinations.
He described CBT examination as “complicated but very efficient and a panacea for examination malpractices.”
Ojerinde, who assured that the one-year-old biometric CBT examination would come into full force by 2015, gave a graphic description of the process of conducting the CBT examination to include sending down questions within three minutes throughout the examination centres where they would be downloaded, populated and distributed through the systems to the student’s computers.
The students’ answers s are there after uploaded as “responses” to JAMB’s offices where the questions are marked and the result subsequently released within two hours.