While the adoption of technology has made many human endeavors easy, its crooked use also does significant harm to the system. Only recently, the issue of who scored the highest mark in this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, conducted by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, shook the country.
Students writing exams
Miss Mmesoma Ejikeme claimed to have scored the highest mark, which was faulted by JAMB and which in the end, showed that the young lady was wrong.
Because of the importance attached to academic qualifications and attainments in the country, some people can be so desperate to be clothed in the garment of academic excellence they don’t possess.
What probably happened
According to a report by the Foundation for Investigative Journalism, FIJ, a check at Google Play store for applications that could help one manipulate UTME results, brought up the Jamb Fun-Fake Jamb Result Maker.
The Jamb Fun-Fake Jamb Result Maker says it helps users create fake UTME results to “fool your friends!”
When downloaded, the app was used to reveal a mock ‘JAMB 2022 UTME Results Notifi cation’ slip. It matched the one paraded by Ejikeme. It is the same slip JAMB discontinued in 2021.
When the form was filled with sample details to see if it would produce a result similar to the one paraded by Ejikeme, it confirmed that one could get a result identical to the one she paraded, but it did not confirm it was the same app she used to obtain hers.
With the result forged via the app, FIJ, a candidate in an exam it did not sit for, scored 400 in the UTME.
When the QR code was scanned, it showed “11231597AC :: Asimiyu Mariam Omobolanle :: 138”, the same result obtained when Ejikeme’s paraded result was scanned.
FIJ also did same thing regarding the claim of one Atung Gerald, a native of Kaura, Kaduna State, who allegedly scored 380 in the UTME exam, when it scanned the QR code attached to his peddled result, it read the same “11231597AC :: Asimiyu Mariam Omobolanle :: 138”. All this points to one thing: the results came from one source with a unique code that returns “11231597AC :: Asimiyu Mariam Omobolanle :: 138.” And the source? ‘Jamb Fun-Fake Jamb Result Maker’.
FIJ went further to obtain two original results from applicants who wrote the 2023 UTME exam. When it scanned their results however, they returned a code that led nowhere. This simply means that codes attached to original 2023 UTME results can’t return scores via the common QR Code – Bar code Scanner.
What should be done
A professor of Educational Evaluation and Computer Education, who is also the Vice- Chancellor of Anchor University, Lagos, Prof. Samuel Oye Bandele, said the digitization of the process is still the way out. He commended the Board for the innovations it has brought to bear on the system.
Speaking on the matter on the sideline of an event in his university, Bandele noted that the Board should not relax efforts at making the exam process seamless and impregnable for cheats.
“I am also an expert in tests and measurements and I can say that the innovations that JAMB management has introduced have been good. JAMB has the authentic database and quality digitization of all their activities. I plead with all needless contending forces to bow to truth and recognise excellence where it belongs in the quest of JAMB to ensure quality inputs into the higher education system.
“As people are trying to circumvent the process, the Board too is not relenting. That is why it introduces new features to its operations regularly. If the sanctity of public exams is not protected, then excellence would be lost. We must encourage excellence, hard work and fairness,” he said.
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