The appointment of Prof Segun Aina as Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has shifted attention to the operational and technical challenges confronting Nigeria’s university admissions body. Aina, who is tasked with superintending over an institution that processes applications for over 1.5 million candidates yearly, sits at the centre of disputes over examination security, result integrity, and access for students in underserved areas.

His background in computer engineering and 15 years of work with the National Examination Council (NECO), National Board for Technical Education (NABTEB), and several state examination boards, places him within the technical side of Nigeria’s assessment system, rather than in traditional university administration.

The board has faced recurring issues in recent years, including breaches of computer-based test centres, delays in result processing, allegations of malpractice, and complaints from candidates about registration glitches and centre allocation.

Each cycle of the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) has renewed public debate about whether JAMB’s digital infrastructure can scale reliably and remain secure against evolving methods of fraud.

Aina’s academic work has focused on digital signal processing, internet computing, and network security.

At Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), he has been involved in projects linking software systems to examination administration and data integrity. Outside the university, he has worked with state education boards to digitise registration and result management processes, an experience that brings him into direct contact with the technical bottlenecks that slow down state-level assessments.

Stakeholders in the education sector noted that the immediate pressure on the new registrar will be to reduce the incidence of malpractice without excluding candidates who lack consistent access to technology.

Rural candidates and those in states with unstable power supply remain dependent on a network of CBT centres that vary in capacity and oversight. Any shift toward more advanced authentication systems, such as biometrics and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven proctoring, will require coordination with these centres and with state governments that manage them.

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Result integrity is another area under scrutiny. Discrepancies between candidate scores and their performance in post-UTME screenings have led universities to rely less on UTME results alone.

Restoring confidence in JAMB scores would require tighter control of the testing environment and more transparent audit trails for each candidate’s examination session.

In his remarks shortly after his appointment, Aina stated that his focus would be on institutional integrity, the use of technology for efficiency and transparency, and building a system that is credible to students and institutions alike.

His appointment came at a time when the federal government is pushing for greater use of data and digital tools in public administration.

For JAMB, that means moving beyond digitising registation forms to re-engineering the entire examination chain: item banking, test delivery, marking, result validation, and admission data transfer to universities. Analysts noted that the board’s role extends beyond admissions. The data it collects influences policy decisions on enrolment capacity, regional access to higher education, and the performance of secondary schools. Weaknesses in data quality or in the credibility of the examination process therefore, have wider implications for education planning.

With millions of students depending on the process each year, the task before the new registrar is to upgrade the system’s technical resilience while maintaining fairness and accessibility.

How quickly JAMB can address centre accreditation, candidate verification, and real-time monitoring will shape the perception of the board’s credibility in the next examination.

(The Guardian)

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