By Viola Ifeyinwa Okolie
My cousin turned 18 yesterday and as is usual in my household, we organised a little parlor party for him.
“Party” as used here is a very loose term because there was basically just my daughter, myself and him there but we had a little cake, we had drinks, my “drop everything and freeze right there” jollof rice and chicken and lots of noise.
He wasn’t happy though, try as we could to cheer him up.
My friends called on phone to sing happy birthday songs to him, sent voice recordings, prayers, etc but no, bobo was not smiling.
Two weeks ago, he had gone to take his JAMB computer based test. He had returned ecstatic at the end of the day, the test had been relatively easy for him even though it would be his first time travelling half way across the state all alone. I am also trying to toughen him up a bit, he is too ajeboic for my agbero household so I had dropped him off at a bus stop with specific instructions for the to and fro trip, then prayed he wouldn’t just keep quiet and be contemplating how to speak to the conductor and find himself somewhere in Ogbomosho all the way from Abuja.
So his excitement was twofold:
1. He had successfully journeyed from one side of the state to the other without me there to hold his hand every step of the way.
2. The exam was an almost sure banker for him, the next morning he got his score and it was 236.
Emmmmm, the NEXT next morning about a hundred marks had vanished into thin air from the score and my cousin was no longer in a joyful mood.
This was his second JAMB attempt and even though he had done quite well in the first one and in the post JAMB, somehow he had been unable to secure admission and here we are with the computer playing “tumbom tumbom, turu ogirisi” with these young minds.
Bear in mind that the secondary schools keep churning out graduates on an annual bases, the universities do not absorb all applicants and we are a country that lays emphasis on paper qualifications. We even sell honorary PhDs to the highest bidders here.
What to do?
He wanted to join the protests, I dissuaded him. We have had the talk about alternative career choices, skills acquisition options and a whole host of other availabilities. One thing I know though, is that I cannot afford the tuition in a private university, those ones na only them waka come. But he has his mind fixed on a profession, so we have to wait and see how JAMB resolves this one.
While we wait, I hear the legislators are ruling for a discontinuance of JAMB computer based testing and a revert back to paper tests.
Really?
Nigeria can seek out retrogressive solutions to modern issues though. Always changing backwards.
Quick questions:
When your car engine knocks or you experience one fault or the other, do you go back to riding donkeys?
When your internet server is down, do you go back to communicating via smoke signals?
If your debit card malfunctions, do you opt to pay in cowrie beads instead?
I doubt anyone expected this CBT to run hitchfree without a major embarrassing glitch like this one, but short of just dashing out marks willy nilly to candidates who are watching their JAMB scores dance “shoki” day by day, there must be some other way to ensure that deserving students from this set get to move at least a step further in their educational pursuits.
I understand the margin of error for this JAMB was quite wide, between 40 to 50 marks. The entry cut off marks for the universities should also reflect a commensurate drop, and then let the students all go and slug it out in the post JAMB exams in the different institutions.
After all, this is a country where a student from one region can get admission into a Unity School with a score of 4 in their common entrance examinations while their counterparts from other regions are expected to score at least 200.
I know what the fears are, if JAMB drops the cut off point by at least 50, all those who needed “quota system” to gain admission would drop completely off the radar.
No problems, we are willing to sacrifice their ambition for one more year rather than have an entire nation full of disgruntled, restless and angry adolescents on our hands.
Let the cut off points drop by the computer apportioned margin of error and let those who still survive it, go ahead and take the post JAMB.
Those who do not survive the cut off point adjustment have an extra year to study and stop relying on archaic contraptions like “quota system” to get them into the universities.
JAMB itself would have one extra year to fine tune it’s processes, identify the glitches and run series of mocks with the cooperation of the schools, to test the system. Please JAMB, don’t waste the next 11 months with your feet up, drinking coffee and reading newspapers only to start running around like headless chickens a few seconds to the 2017 joint UTME exams. Look sharp now.
But to return back to the age of pencil and paper? Haba Nigeria. No please…