JAMB Adopts New Policy That Prevents Candidates From Scoring Zero in UTME

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The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has disclosed that the policy of score standardisation has been adopted for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination. According to JAMB with this policy, Candidates who register for the UTME cannot score zero, even if they are absent from the examination.

LEFT: JAMB Registrar, RIGHT: JAMB logo

Similarly, candidates who did not attempt any question or who did not get any answer correctly were also captured under the policy and would be awarded a “common scale with uniform metric.”
This means that all candidates, who are registered for a paper, will be awarded a score for that paper, and there would be no zero score.  This new development was made known in a paper presented by JAMB's Registrar, Prof Is-haq Oloyede titled: ‘Social responsiveness in applying assessment technicality: The case of standardisation of a zero score in the UTME.’, and captured in the JAMB weekly bulletin.

The board said, “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."


The board noted that apart from Oloyede, the panel of experts, which brainstormed on score standardisation, comprised Prof Boniface Nworgu, Prof Raheem Lawal, Prof Muhammad Yakasai and Dr Omokunmi Popoola.