The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has denied reports attributed to it that candidates would not be scoring zero even if they did not write the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
Rather, such candidates would be marked absent.
It described such report as incorrect in a tweet on Wednesday, 30th October.
The tweet read thus, “The widespread publication that even without sitting for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), a Candidate would not score zero is incorrect. Any Candidate who registers for our examination and fails to appear is marked ABSENT and scores NOTHING, not even zero.”
The widespread publication that even without sitting for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), a Candidate would not score zero is incorrect. Any Candidate who registers for our examination and fails to appear is marked ABSENT and scores NOTHING, not even zero.
— JAMB (@JAMBHQ) October 30, 2019
Some media platforms, not including EduCeleb.com had reported of the earlier claim attributing it to JAMB Registrar, Ishaq Oloyede.
Oloyede, a professor, was speaking at the 45th International Association for Education Conference in Azerbaijan.
According to a weekly bulletin from the examining body, the registrar said a score standardisation policy it had adopted meant that registered candidates will earn scores for expressing interest in the examination hence there would be no zero score.
Oloyede’s paper was titled titled, “Social responsiveness in applying assessment technicality: The case of standardisation of a zero score in the UTME.”
EduCeleb.com obtained a copy of it and can report that there was no reference to awarding marks to absent candidates.
Excerpts are presented below.
“The adoption of the score standardisation is a technical procedure for transforming candidates’ raw scores in the different subjects taken by each candidate to a common scale with uniform metric or units, which is the globally accepted procedure.
“The general public hardly understands nor appreciates why scores should be transformed and this has been generating controversies and throwing up all sorts of unfounded arguments. It is to be noted that some poorly educated professionals consider the transformation of scores as an arbitrary allocation of unmerited scores.
“The issue has been compounded by candidates whose scores of zero were transformed alongside other candidates’ scores of above zero. Transformation is generally across board and was not focused on individual candidates.
“Candidates with zero scores include those whose attempts earned them zero because they did not get any answer correct; those who mischievously did not attempt any question throughout the course of the examination as well as those who were absent from examination.”
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