The Joint Admission and Matriculations Board, JAMB, have revealed why no candidate sitting for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, will ever score zero.
The board stated that even a candidate that does not write anything will benefit from a new development which will award some scores based on common scale.
This was disclosed by Registrar of the Board, Prof Ishaq Oloyede, during a presentation at the 45th International Association for Education Conference in Azerbaijan.
The new policy will see that all candidates earn scores for expressing interest in the examination.
The paper presented by Oloyede 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 general public hardly understands nor appreciates why scores should be transformed and this has been generating controversies and throwing up all sorts of unfounded arguments. It is to be noted that some poorly educated professionals consider the transformation of scores as an arbitrary allocation of unmerited scores.
“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.”