Powerjamb

Two million Nigerian teenagers apply for college admission every year. 70% don’t make it in, so they end up reneging to other options, depending on financial sponsorship, pressure, and age.
At the root of the problem, higher institutions in Nigeria cannot keep up with growing demands for undergraduate education. It is more alarming that qualified candidates often don’t make the cut, having chosen a course/institution too competitive for their academic standing.
Powerjamb makes a recommendation to candidates based on their grades, preferred career paths, and financial situation. A candidate may have expressed a desire to study a highly demanded course, but our AI system might recommend the same course elsewhere, or a slightly related course in the same institution.
Powerjamb is our first stab at a vision to ignite hope in the young population of the world. If they can own their education, they will take more responsibility.

Getting admitted to a higher institution in Nigeria takes several predictable steps. At some point, most college aspirants will need to select three institutions, apply for, and take the annual University Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, and score a minimum baseline cut-off mark to be considered for a selected university’s entrance test. It gets a little trickier. Many institutions will only consider candidates that select them as their first choice. The usual dilemma is that a candidate must be right the first time or wait until the next year.
This issue is further exacerbated when too many candidates demand a course at an institution. With demand so high, the requirements go high enough to accommodate only the capacity. A typical case in point is 2000+ candidates looking to study Medicine/Surgery when only 100 candidates can be allowed. In this specific situation, most of the applicants are above the general average, but they end up missing admission altogether, where much less qualified candidates may get admitted into less competitive majors without effort.
Consider that, according to trend, the candidate’s score rarely improves that much over subsequent rewrites, leaving them to choose another course anyway.

Powerjamb is a Machine Learning and Analytics solution. Depending on their current stage in the admission process, a student is first required to input available scores or grades from exams they may have taken. We will augment this data with a curated test we administer. Next, we will request the candidate’s preferred career path. We want to know why they want to study a course at an institution, and if that selection is crucial. This information is important because parents sometimes require their candidates to school within 200km of their residence. Lastly, we will assess a candidate’s financial situation to know who will pay for their tuition, what the occupation of their sponsors are, and if private universities are out of the question. Private universities typically have the least stringent entrance requirements, but are often very expensive. The next in that order are state universities. Federal universities are the most demanded and least expensive.

Armed with these data points, our model will judge for fit, to see if a candidate meets the odds for their current selection. If not, we will offer recommendations.

Recommendations vary from a change of career/major, to a change of institution, to areas of improvement.

Candidates are typically between ages 15 and 20.

Employability for many Nigerians is a function of their self confidence in what they can do, and this is rarely instilled by our education system. With Powerjamb's solution, people can take more charge of their learning, have better expectations from the correlation between effort and reward, and invest in learning skills that get them employable in the new digital economy.