The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board [JAMB] has adopted a policy of score standardisation under which the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination [UTME] candidates cannot get zero even if they are absent from the examination.

JAMB said apart from absentee candidates, candidates who did not attempt any question or who did not get any answer correctly were also captured under the policy and would be awarded a “common scale with uniform metric.”

The score standardisation policy means that all candidates, who are registered for a paper, will be awarded a score for that paper, and there would be no zero scores, JAMB weekly bulletin quoted its Registrar, Prof Is-haq Oloyede, as saying in a paper titled, ‘Social responsiveness in applying assessment technicality: The case of standardisation of a zero score in the UTME.’

Oloyede, in conjunction with other experts, made the presentation on score standardisation at the 45th International Association for Education Conference held in Azerbaijan.

The board said,

“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 the examination.”

The board noted that apart from Oloyede, the panel of experts, which brainstormed on score standardisation, comprised Prof Boniface Nworgu, Prof Raheem Lawal, Prof Muhammad Yakasai and Dr Omokunmi Popoola.