Let me start by saying I am today by God's grace a medical student at the prestigious university of Ibadan, the recent happenings have left me wondering if some students that support scrapping of post utme truly understand its effects.
While the structure of post utme in many schools has its deformities like students being asked questions totally unrelated to their course of pursuit and some schools charging very high fees for the exam, its many good sides can still not be overlooked.
Using my story as a case study, I sat for jamb after I had read like my life depended on it, in fact after I finished my exam I was so confident that I felt if I was given a score lower than 350 it wouldn't be justice served, but, lo and behold I saw my score the following day and it was just 237, it felt like life hated me, I kept asking myself that "what went wrong ?".
But as God will have it, Unibadan didn't give too much importance to the jamb score and all of us that had 200 and above were invited for the post utme using post jamb as the sole criteria. So eventually it was my post utme score that got me into school. This is also the story of many other students you find around.
It's worth to note at this point that the persons with the best performance in the post utme that we were tested based on our four jamb subjects were not necessarily some of those with very "monstrous" jamb scores, the highest (with 86) had only 230 in jamb while the lowest in the post utme (who scored 17) had 278 in jamb. It stands to reason that something is fundamentally wrong with the structure of Jamb. Instead of scrapping post utme "now" I would proffer the following suggestions
1. That universities be made to charge as little as possible for post utme exams (maybe fix it at #1000)
2. That universities be made to test students on relevant topics and subjects to their chosen courses
3. That JAMB as a body be reformed and the exam become credible so they'll be no need to further examine the students.
So while it may be easy to say universities just want to "exploit" students, I think that if JAMB as a body truly has the interest of students at heart ,it should be more concerned with making sure students feel justified and not cheated after sitting for the board's exam.
Finally, I hope that whatever conclusions are reached in the end are in the best interest of all the hard-working Nigerian students who strive so much just to get to school and actualize their dreams ( a situation that shouldn't be).
