Adamawa Parents Criticize JAMB Over Mock Examination

Parents of candidates who participated in the 2025 mock examination organized by the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board last Thursday have lashed out at the board, calling its leadership a group of incompetent officials.

These visibly frustrated parents made their remarks in reaction to what they described as the board’s inability to organize the exam as planned.

A particularly irritated parent named Musa Abubakar bluntly said, “This JAMB people as a body, since my days of younger years, has always been and paraded a bunch of failed administrators.”

Our reporter learned that the organization of the Mock JAMB exam was disrupted by numerous flaws and other irregularities.

It was also discovered, for example, that the first group of candidates who were scheduled to begin the Computer-Based Test by 7am failed to arrive at many of the designated centres.

When our reporter arrived at some centres in Yola, the capital of Adamawa State, around 1pm, the mock exams had still not begun.

One CBT staff member, who agreed to speak with our reporter on the condition of anonymity due to a lack of official clearance, explained that the confusion resulted from poor connectivity from the JAMB headquarters.

“We work with the JAMB network, and when their network is bad, there is nothing you can do,” he said.

A parent whose child wrote the mock test at the Modibbo Adama University venue shared that the exam eventually started six hours after the original time.

“The implication is that most of the students had to be rescheduled because the number of batches that were supposed to sit for the examination today could not sit for the examination, and the expenses are now shifted to the parents,” he said.

According to the same parent, “the 7am batch only finished the examination at 4pm.”

Our reporter observed that many of the parents present at the venue appeared visibly unhappy as they demanded that JAMB be removed as a requirement for admission into universities across Nigeria.

Abubakar, who mentioned that he traveled a long distance to bring his son for the mock test, went on to ask, “What is the relevance of JAMB conducting an examination for institutions that don’t have power over the number of students they can admit?”