JAMB Registrar, Is-haq Oloyede has said that the coronavirus pandemic should be blamed for the poor performance of candidates in the just-concluded Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination.
Recall that there have been a public outcry following the massive failure recorded after the UTME results were released.
DAILY POST reported that some candidates and parents who spoke with newsmen in separate interviews also expressed displeasure at the outcome of the results.
However, speaking during an interview on the Nigerian Television Authority, NTA, Oloyede said that pandemic affected the smooth running of the academic calendar.
He also affirmed that this year’s UTME results were poorer than those of three years ago.
According to him, 99.65 per cent scored 120 marks and above out of the possible 400 in 2021, as against 99.80 per cent in 2020.
“All informed education experts understand why we recorded a lot of failures this time around. They knew the point at which we were in the academic calendar before the examination was taken in 2020 and in 2021.
“The students had gone far in their syllabus last year before they took the examination.But this year, they suffered incomplete academic sessions.
“These candidates had to cope with emergency online lessons with many other disturbing factors like insecurity, so we shouldn’t have expected that the results will come out unaffected by these,” he said.