The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board, (JAMB), Computer Based Test (CBT) has begun at the Ikechukwu Iheanacho Prometric Centre of the Federal University Oye-Ekiti. The exercise which started Saturday May 18, 2013 will end on Wednesday 22^nd May 2013.

The CBT is the latest improvement in the JAMB admission processes which tends to eliminate the use of pencil and papers during the examinations. The examination is scheduled for 8:30am and 1:00pm on each examination day with about two hundred candidates participating at each session.

According to Mallam Tunde Ahmed, JAMB Supervisor at the FUOYE Centre, JAMB is trying to migrate from the old Paper-Pencil Test (PPT) to a Computer-Based Test (CBT) examination method.

Between 2013 and 2014, candidates will be allowed the choice among any of the three examination formats obtainable in JAMB today; the PPT, the CBT, and a combination of these two called the Dual Based Test (DBT). The third option avails the candidate the opportunity of using paper and computer at the same time.

Mallam Ahmed however revealed that by 2015, the Board would migrate finally from paper test and the problems associated with it to a situation in which JAMB examinations would be written solely on the computer. The major problem inherent in the paper test, according to him, is examination malpractices.

He is optimistic that the CBT method will eliminate the perennial problem of examination malpractices because of the biometric exercise put in place from registration to entering the examination hall. Candidates’ thumbprints are captured during registration and must be recognised by the computer during a follow-up thumb printing exercise before the candidate is finally allowed into the examination hall. This process aims at eliminating impersonation.

During the past JAMB examination, 20,000 candidates had their results withheld and a good number of them because of improper registration. JAMB has, however, released the results.

Another action put in place to fight examination malpractice is the un-serialization of questions. By the CBT method, questions are re-arranged so that no two candidates will have same series of exam questions. They will no longer follow the same pattern of numbering. In the simplest terms, a candidate’s number one question will not be his neighbour’s number one.

Again, only one question is displayed at a time. This makes it difficult for a candidate to remember questions he had already gone past. These are wonderful measures to check examination malpractices which have become endemic in our nation’s education system. Our earnest prayer is that it works.

Last Saturday, May 18 2013 at FUOYE (fuoye.edu.ng) centre, biometric check began at 6:30am, while the examination started at 8:30a.m. Even by 9:30am, this reporter could still see candidates queuing up to be checked before they were allowed into the examination hall.

Meanwhile, candidates for the 1:00pm session had already converged at the gate as early as 8:50 am, waiting for their turn. Overall, the JAMB official was full of praises for FUOYE given the quality of infrastructure the young university already has on ground, saying the Ikechukwu Iheanacho ICT Centre, ( IIIC), provided by Federal University Oye, (FUOYE), for the test is way ahead of those of its peers and called on the University management to sustain this apparent lead.

Click http://ict.fuoye.edu.ng/information/latest-news/101-jamb-cbt-exams for further reading