The Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB) is a Nigerian entrance examination board for tertiary-level institutions. The board conducts entrance examinations for prospective undergraduates into Nigerian universities.
The board is also charged with the responsibility to administer similar examinations for applicants to Nigerian public and private monotechnics, polytechnics, and colleges of educations.
All of these candidates must have obtained the West Africa School Certificate, now West African Examinations Council, WAEC, or its equivalent, National Examination Council (Nigeria), NECO.
By 1974, there were seven federal universities in the country. Every one of these existing universities conducted its own concessional examination and admitted its students. However, this system of admission revealed serious limitations and quite often waste of resources in the process of administering the concessional examination, especially on the part of the candidates. The general untidiness in the uncoordinated system of admissions into universities and the attendant problems were sufficient cause for concern to the committee of vice chancellors.
In the 2009 University Matriculation Exam, the grading system of the normally reputable examination body was subject to serious controversy when the overall performance was one of the poorest on records. Much to JAMB’s embarrassment, it was later revealed that the machines which optically graded the papers had erroneous answers and the JAMB changed some students scores by as much as 15%.
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