The Registrar of the Board, Segun Aina, disclosed this in Abuja on Saturday after a five-kilometre walk organised for the board’s staff as part of preparations for the 2027 UTME.
Aina said the board would introduce several technology-driven initiatives ahead of the examination, including a pre-registration application to guide prospective candidates.
He explained that the pre-registration application is a mobile application that allows candidates from the comfort of their homes to get their details from the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), register with their biodata, select their subjects, their courses and their institutions.
During that process, he said, the board would be given some advanced advice that it did not use before, such that when a candidate is trying to select a course, the candidate will see an idea of what the entry marks for that course were in the previous year.
That information, he said, will guide candidates on course selection and institution selection, because each candidate knows his or her academic abilities and having such information will guide them on the choices to make.
According to the JAMB registrar, the application would also cut down the waiting time for candidates when they are eventually registering for the UTME, including capturing their biometrics.
He added that the board would also introduce an innovation that would prevent candidates from making a wrong choice of course of study during registration.
He said that before now, a candidate could potentially make wrong subject choices for the course he or she intended to do, but the board is going to make that technically impossible, which means a candidate cannot progress with the application if the subject combination is wrong, alongside a lot of other innovations that are coming.
He, however, noted that the board would ensure that there are enhanced biometric checks during the actual test itself to checkmate malpractice and all forms of irregularities.
The JAMB boss said the board has given up some ground and made some concessions to reduce trauma for the candidates in terms of being able to change their biodata and things like that, and in exchange for that, it will be applying enhanced checks at the point of the examination to make sure that it protects the integrity of the system.
He also spoke about other small innovations for convenience, noting that on one or two occasions, people have felt some questions are faulty, although there is the argument that when a question is a bit too difficult, a candidate automatically thinks it is faulty.
To address this, he said, the board would provide a button during the exam that allows a candidate to report a faulty item, and the board will take all of that data and use it to interrogate those items and make sure that people are being assessed properly.
At the end of the exam, Aina said candidates would rate their CBT centre.
He said the board’s private sector partners, the CBT centres, have been very supportive since the inception of CBT over 10 years ago, and the board will continue to partner with them whilst holding them to the highest possible standards, so it will also allow candidates to rate their experience at the centre.
