Dr Fabian Benjamin, the JAMB’s Public Relations Officer has disclosed that the board ahead of the 2016 UTME had invested in the training and acquisitions of softwares that will reduce the possibility of candidates guessing answers correctly.

He said "Technically, what we were using before to test students was what we called Classical Test Theory, but now we have adopted what we call Item Response Theory.
The difference is that the Item Response Theory reduces the percentage of guessing.The tendency for students to guess and guess right is minimal with this software."

With this development, Candidates who are experts in guessing answers to questions during examinations, may find it hard to cope unless they studied hard

In Response to this i attempted to find the meaning of IRT (item response theory) and how it might eliminate guess work as claimed.
" It's a style of test administration that became possible as a result of computerized testing. Theoretically it was possible before but the amount of labor it would have required from the test administrator made it impractical. The computer keeps track of your test performance in real time and adjusts the difficulty of your questions accordingly. The benefit of this approach is that it reduces the number of questions you need to answer before your test results can give you a meaningful rank by skipping questions so easy you would have gotten them all right and so hard you would have gotten them all wrong" Will Northup, M.S. in Psychology

"Item response theory is a method of developing and scoring tests that attempts to have questions of different difficulty in such a way that the total test maximally differentiates people in terms of ability on the underlying trait. "
Peter Flom, PhD in psychometrics. Statistical consultant to researchers
https://www.quora.com/How-would-you-explain-IRT-item-response-theory-to-a-layperson

I think this means instead of actually marking your answers, the computer sends you a group of questions which might be easy or hard to answer, then attempts to measure how knowledgeable you are on the subject by gauging your correct responses to how hard the question might be. Would like to encourage nairalanders to research more on the subject and make appropriate comments as the thought of not being able to guess answers right is kinda driving some students crazy. lolx
N.B. I am not a jambite, just a nice guy.

cc: lalasticala

I think the computer based GRE already uses it.

i swear, this is shit! it simply makes no sense at all.