Education
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The Joint Admission and Matriculations Board will scrap scratch cards for exam registration and checking results by 2017
| By Anayo Ezugwu | Oct 3, 2016 @ 01:00 GMT |
THE Joint Admission and Matriculations Board, JAMB, will stop students from using scratch cards to register for examinations, and check the results by 2017. According to Ishaq Oloyede, Registrar, JAMB, students will have to generate a PIN number for themselves from their phones or computers before registering for examinations.
Oloyede, who spoke at the national executive council meeting of the Non-Academic Staff Union, NASU, said the board would not support a situation where banks and vendors hoard the cards, only to sell them at a higher price. The registrar challenged NASU to get involved in the ownership of computer-based testing centres, saying those who own the centres are businessmen merely exploiting students.
According to him, if academic-based stakeholders, such as NASU, own CBT centres, the board will be confident the examinations will be conducted without hitch.
On his part, Abubakar Rasheed, executive secretary of the National Universities Commission, NUC, said the commission would build a system in line with global standards. He assured the union the commission would address issues according to its agreement with the federal government, adding that he has met with pro-chancellors on the matter.
The executive secretary said he would meet with vice chancellors of about 140 public and private universities and other institutions affiliated to them to state the commission’s position, which will be forwarded to the government.
Rasheed said that the commission would take submissions from all unions in the universities so that its memo to the minister of education will capture every issue. “I will lead a team of NUC management to a meeting towards the end of next week with vice chancellors of federal universities, then vice chancellors of state universities, vice chancellors of private universities, heads of institutions affiliated to universities to discuss challenges confronting the university system.
“We will also discuss challenges inhibiting the implementation of the 2009 federal government/unions agreement. Within the next two weeks of concluding the discussions, I will raise a memo drawing the attention of the minister of Education to the agreement.”
However, Peters Adeyemi, general secretary, NASU, said, “Government has not demonstrated the will to implement the agreement. Government is a continuum and agreements are binding on successive governments, and this government must know that. The labour unions in universities are unhappy with the way things are going in the system.
“We think the executive secretary of NUC inherited this liability, and as a responsible union, we needed to give him an opportunity to address this problem holistically, and we think we should give him some time to see if there would be results. The result of his engagements would determine how quickly industrial action can be prevented or otherwise.”
Adeyemi said the unions may not give a lengthy time before declaring industrial action, saying “we have waited for so long, and we are not willing to wait too long again. The government must do the needful before crisis would start in the universities, lest Nigerians say we have started again when we declare strike. We are calling on Nigerians to help us beg this government that our patience is running out.”
He said, “It is wicked for anybody in government to say justifies non-payment of salaries using recession. Who caused us to be in recession? Is it workers? No. We are pushed to where we are by the ruling class irrespective of the political parties they belong. It is the collusion of the ruling class that put us where we are.”
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