By John Ikani
A document issued by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has revealed the extent which mass failure rocked the 2021 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
According to the document made available to newsmen by the Board after its Policy Meeting in Abuja early in the week, only 168, 613 scored above 200 out of the available 400 marks.
The performance was a far cry from the 404,740 that scored over 200 out of the 1.9 million that sat for the examination in 2020.
In 2020, a total of 2.11 million applicants sought admission into tertiary institutions in Nigeria, with over 300,000 direct entry applicants who needed not to write UTME.
This year, 1, 428,208 applied and over 300,000 were also direct entry candidates.
A break down of candidates performance as contained in the document, revealed that 168, 613 scored 200 marks and above, 64,323 scored 190-199, and 90, 688 scored between 180 and 189 marks
Others are 117,970 scoring between 170 and 179 marks, 149,421 scoring between 160 and 169 marks.
For the range of 140 to 159 marks, 369,023 candidates fell into that category, while 170,816 scored between 130 and 139 marks.
The cut-off points for 2021 admission are yet to be fully decided by the schools.
For 2021, Oyo State presented the highest number of candidates with 82,521, followed by Osun with 74, 234 and Ogun with 70,971.
What you should know
The massive failure recorded in the 2021 UTME is the worst ever in the history of JAMB, based on analysis so far.
The situation is worrisome to the extent parents have started blaming the examiners, and not the candidates.
Most parents complained that students were given the wrong curriculum, poor facilities at Computer-Based Test centres, poor network and others. They also attributed the mass failure to strict marking by JAMB.
Also reacting, JAMB Registrar, Prof Is-haq Oloyede, in a live programme on the Nigerian Television Authority, tagged: ‘Weekend File’, admitted that the 2021 UTME results were poorer than those of three years ago.
He blamed the coronavirus pandemic for the poor performance of candidates. The registrar said the pandemic affected the smooth running of the academic calendar.
Many others attribute the failure to Computer Based Test (CBT) system to the fact that most of the candidates who sat for the examination aren’t computer literate, and lack proper orientation on how to operate computer.
