UTME: JAMB says unverified candidates to write exam at board’s headquarters, reels out data of registration

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has disclosed that candidates for the 2019 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) who are unable to complete their biometrics registration on exam day would sit the exam at the board’s Abuja Headquarters.

The board maintained that candidates whose fingerprints were not captured at exam centers would not be allowed to write the exam under any guise.

The exam which has been rescheduled for between April 11 and 18 would be sat for by 1,886,008 registered candidates.

This was disclosed by the board’s Registrar, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, during a stakeholders’ meeting in Abuja on Monday.

On students who would be unable to complete their biometrics, he said, “They will come to the JAMB head office in Abuja to sit for their examination and not any other centre.

Any candidate that cannot be verified in the biometrics data base must not be allowed to take the examination under any guise.”

He also announced that the board had partnered with security operatives and agencies to curb cyber crimes and eliminate modern cheating methods used by fraudulent candidates sitting for the exam.

He said, “Our challenges are many; first is impersonation. Also, there is the illegitimate movement of routers to unregistered locations; the illegal extension of registration points from the CBT centre network to other locations, the extortion of candidates by some centres, attempts on cloning of registration SIM cards through the use of technology and operation of syndicates of both CBT centres and cyber cafes.

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“Others are candidates patronising cyber cafes for materials relating to JAMB registration or examination at centres such as compact disc, examination pack, examination questions and answers, erosion of values and fraudulent private tutorial classes.

“What is our way forward? We are partnering security operatives and relevant agencies on cyber crimes. We are engaging technocrats and tapping from their knowledge. We are also moving some key services to the registration portal in order to prevent extortion of candidates.”

Also speaking at the event, JAMB’s Head of Media and Information, Dr Fabian Benjamin revealed that a larger percentage of candidates registered for Medicine, Pharmacy and Health Sciences across universities with a total figure of 435,897.

275,323 were female candidates while 160,574 of the candidates were male.

He added that interest for Agricultural relatesd courses reduced with 31,729 registered candidates across, with only 14,586 females and 18,143 males.

He noted that faculties of Agriculture across polytechnics also had a low number of candidates registered for the 2019 UTME.

According to him, Only 2,303 candidates; 949 females and 1,354 males may write the examination to study courses under the faculty.

Across the Polytechnics, Faculties of Social Sciences had the highest number of registered candidates with a total of 19,283 while a further breakdown reveals 10,337 males and 8,946 females.

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