Ishaq Oloyede, registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), says the coronavirus pandemic is responsible for the mass failure recorded during this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
Oloyede spoke when he featured on ‘Weekend File‘, a programme on the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA).
The JAMB registrar revealed that this year’s results were poorer when compared to what was obtainable in the last three years.
According to him, the situation was caused by the outbreak of the pandemic which grounded academic calendar across the country for a long period of time.
Giving a break down of this year’s UTME results, the registrar disclosed that 99.65 per cent scored 120 marks and above out of the possible 400 in 2021 as against 99.80 per cent in 2020
“In 2018, it was 99.99 per cent but in 2019 it dropped to 99.92. Also, in 2020, 69.82 per cent of the total candidates who sat the UTME scored 160 and above but in 2021, it reduced to 65.62 per cent,” he said.
“But this is expected. In Nigeria, we think we do not live in a global community. All informed education experts understand why it is so. They knew the point at which we were in the academic calendar before the examination was taken in 2020 and in 2021.
“Last year, when they took the examination, they (the students) had gone far in their syllabus. But this year, they suffered incomplete academic sessions; they had to cope with emergency online lessons and even many other disturbances like insecurity.”
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