Our Standardisation Policy Will Not Make UTME Candidate To Score Zero – JAMB

By our corespondent

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board(JAMB) has disclosed that following its adoption of a new standardisation policy, no candidate sitting for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination,(UTME), will score zero.

The board explained that even candidates who did not attempt any question or who did not get any answer correctly would benefit from the policy and would also be awarded some scores based on a common scale.

The implication of the score standardisation policy means that all registered candidates will earn scores for expressing interest in the examination hence there would be no zero score.

Oloyede’s paper titled, ‘Social responsiveness in applying assessment technicality: The case of standardisation of a zero score in the UTME.’ reads in part: “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 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.

“Candidates with zero scores include those whose attempts earned them zero because they did not get any answer correct; those who mischievously did not attempt any question throughout the course of the examination as well as those who were absent from examination.”