Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has — Margaret Mead
There is no gainsaying the fact that Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, the hardworking Registrar/Chief Executive of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has been on a one-man mission to eliminate examination malpractice in the nation’s public examination processes since assuming the leadership of the examination body on 1 August 2016. That he met a Board battling an image crisis is no longer news or that he had, without much ado, set upon the task of redeeming this battered image of one of the nation’s foremost examination body and had largely succeeded at doing just that over the years is there for all to see. In this wise, his automation of the Board’s admission process through the institution of the Central Admissions Processing System (CAPS) to eliminate human interference in the admission process; the linking of National Identification Number (NIN) with Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) registration to checkmate impersonation and the ticketing platform, which was set up to streamline all communications with the Board from candidates, Computer-Based Test (CBT) centres and other stakeholders. All transactions carried out on the platform are time-stamped and documented to enable the Board to track the trends of perceptions and complaints across its systems and facilities nationwide at a glance and is open 24 hours every day, among others.
Underscoring all these innovations by Oloyede are his three personal and interrelated codes integrity, fairness and transparency, which are the hallmarks of a personality that does not suffer fools gladly, reinforcing the refrain in some quarters that as a Chief Executive, Oloyede would not bat an eyelid at deploying a thousand naira to trace the whereabouts of a dime. Perhaps, it is this penchant for thoroughness that underscored his recent inauguration of a 23-member Special Committee on Examination Infractions last 18 August during which he stated that the Board is currently facing a heightened level of assault which, if not urgently addressed, could negatively impact every sector of the country and that is the emergent trends of AI-enabled registration and examination malpractice. To tackle this menace, Oloyede had assembled some of the finest brains in academia, civil societies, law and security agencies, to map out the challenges, develop sustainable solutions, and at the same time, safeguard innocent individuals from being unduly affected.
The terms of reference of the committee is both revealing and alarming as they include identifying the methods, patterns, tools, and technologies used to perpetrate these infractions; reviewing current examination and registration policies and recommend improvements to strengthen system resilience against such malpractices; determining the culpability or otherwise of each of the 6,458 suspected candidates, whose results are still being withheld.
The writer is amused at the naivety or mischievousness of some commentators, who had tried to castigate Oloyede’s attention to details or thoroughness by pointing that about 1.9 million candidates had sat the 2025 UTME, hence, they opined that it is needless to go after just 6,458 suspected examination infractors. Perhaps, they need to be educated that conventional wisdom dictates that one should “never underestimate the big importance of small things”!
In its report, the committee had submitted that AI-enabled malpractice as perpetrated by some, institutions, CBT centres and candidates is on the rise. The Board had disclosed an alarming trend, whereby certain universities were found to have admitted candidates into full-time programmes under false pretences, and later forged Nigerian Certificate in Education (NCE) results to qualify them for 200-level direct entry admission adding that approximately 120 candidates were implicated in this scam. CBT centres, on their own, had been implicated in finger blending, which is the integration of fingerprints from multiple individuals into a single registration profile to fraudulently validate the identity of a candidate (4,251 cases), image morphing, involving the merging of the photograph of a registered candidate with that of an impersonator to create a blended image that could deceive physical inspection during examination entry (190 cases). With regard to candidates, they have been discovered to have been involved in albinism falsification, whereby they falsely declare themselves as albinos in order to benefit from relaxed image-capturing protocols designed to accommodate the peculiarities of genuine albino candidates(1,878), multiple NIN registrations, entailing the use of duplicate/triplicate NINs or alternate identities by candidates (30), result/credential forgery involving candidates presenting forged certificates of Interim Joint Matriculation Board, Joint Universities Preliminary Examinations Board, West African Examinations Council, and altered UTME results to gain admission (29), and solicitation, whereby candidates are found to have been in communication with or soliciting assistance from examination centres (110) totaling 6,458 cases in all.
It is evident that Oloyede is not chasing after shadows as examination malpractice has evolved into a complex, technology-enabled, and culturally normalised ecosystem .Also, according to him, fraud has not only become systemic and organised, nor limited to candidates, but has also extended to parents, CBT centres, and institutions leading to the inevitable conclusion that current security, policy, and legal frameworks are grossly inadequate to address these emergent fraudulent practices especially against the backdrop of AI-enabled image morphing, albinism falsification and finger blending. Hence, what Nigeria needs now are bold reforms as currently being spearheaded by Oloyede, so that public confidence in JAMB and its processes as well as her higher education system can be sustained.
Ampitan writes from Lagos
