by Azeez Adeniyi

The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board on Wednesday said candidates sitting for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination would now spend two hours instead of three hours.

The examination body said it has reduced Use of English questions from 100 questions to 60 questions, while the other three subjects would be 40 questions each, making a total of 180 questions.

Registrar/Chief Executive of JAMB, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, announced the changes in Kaduna during the commencement of a strategic planning retreat.

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Oloyede said, “We are going to reduce the duration of the examination for this year’s UTME. You cannot keep children of this age for three hours. For their age, the maximum time you can keep them is two hours. So, we are considering the reduction in the time they spend because once it is more than two hours, you can’t expect that they will retain their presence of mind.”

He said JAMB has also made some changes in the use of computer for the test.

“From the general feedback on the adoption of the Computer Based Test mode, we have noted the challenge of computer low level literacy of some candidates, especially with the phobia for the mouse. This has been responsible partly for the call by some people for reversal to the Paper and Pencil Test mode. In order to ensure equity and level playing field for all candidates taking the UTME, JAMB has designed a system that will allow candidates to use only eight keys without the use of the mouse.

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“All the candidates need to do is to press the letters A,B,C,D for responses(answer) to questions and keys: P = Previous question, N = Next question, S = Submit responses when candidate has finished examination R = Reverse (do not intend to go further to submit again).”

Oloyede added, “In order to amplify the past efforts and also expand the frontiers of equity and inclusiveness, we have met with the executive committee of the Association of Blind Persons in Nigeria at the board’s headquarters in Abuja in February 2017 and we also met with prospective blind candidates from a school for the blind in Lagos about two weeks ago at the University of Lagos.

“The outcome of these meetings revealed that while the challenged group fully appreciates the board’s recent efforts at improving and upgrading the facilities for the administration of the board’s examination for the blind candidates.”

Azeez