The board explained that even candidates who did not attempt any question or who did not get any answer correctly would benefit from the policy and would also be awarded some scores based on a common scale.
According to a weekly bulletin released to journalists on Monday in Abuja, Registrar of the Board, Prof Ishaq Oloyede, made this known while presenting a paper at the 45th International Association for Education Conference in Azerbaijan.
The implication of the score standardisation policy means that all registered candidates will earn scores for expressing interest in the examination hence there would be no zero score.
Oloyede’s paper titled, ‘Social responsiveness in applying assessment technicality: The case of standardisation of a zero score in the UTME.’ reads in part: “The adoption of the score standardisation is a technical procedure for transforming candidates’ raw scores in the different subjects taken by each candidate to a common scale with uniform metric or units, which is the globally accepted procedure.
“The general public hardly understands nor appreciates why scores should be transformed and this has been generating controversies and throwing up all sorts of unfounded arguments. It is to be noted that some poorly educated professionals consider the transformation of scores as an arbitrary allocation of unmerited scores.
“The issue has been compounded by candidates whose scores of zero were transformed alongside other candidates’ scores of above zero. Transformation is generally across board and was not focused on individual candidates.
“Candidates with zero scores include those whose attempts earned them zero because they did not get any answer correct; those who mischievously did not attempt any question throughout the course of the examination as well as those who were absent from examination.”
