The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has revealed that more than 1.16 million candidates seeking admission to tertiary institutions have so far registered to sit for the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
This is as the examination body has insisted that it would not extend the deadline for the 2023 unified UTME registration and warned centres against extortion of candidates.
This was made known in Abuja by JAMB Registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, during a monitoring tour of some CBT centres in Abuja on Saturday, February 11, 2023.
Oloyede, during the tour, visited CBT centres located at Total Child International School, Dutse, JAMB Abuja zonal office, Life Camp, Global Distance Learning Institute and Sascon International College, Abuja.
CBT centres to stop bulk registration, bulk purchase of pin
- The JAMB registrar said, “Registration is going on well except for some of these schools.
- “UTME is not a school-based examination, it’s individual candidates and you can see what some schools are doing collecting N30,000 from candidates in the name of JAMB and then end up missing the telephone number of the candidates.
- “So once they keep the telephone number of candidates it is unlikely that the candidates when we are contacting them to make a change in their timetable, you send a text to them and it will not get to them.’’
Oloyede noted that after these candidates have graduated from the school and want to change course they don’t have access to it.
- He added, “And that is a way of extorting the parents and we will take adequate steps to make sure that we stop that.
- “We will tell every CBT centre to stop doing bulk purchases of pins and bulk registration.
- ”So if a centre sells more than one pin to a source or collects money for more than one pin from a source, then we will sanction such centre.’’
He urged candidates to report cases of extortion, saying that there was a code for candidates to reach the board when they come across any case of extortion while promising there would be a reward for such actions.
For the record
- JAMB had in March 2022, revealed that a total number of 1, 837, 011 candidates are registered for the 2022 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME)/Direct Entry (DE) following the closure of the registration exercise.
- Recall that the examination body commenced the sale of the 2023 UTME on January 14, 2023, and is expected to close on February 14, 2023.
- JAMB said the conduct of its optional mock UTME is to take place on March 16, 2023. It, however, noted that the registration does not include Direct Entry (DE) application documents as the DE registration would commence from February 20 to April 20, 2023.
- The conduct of the 2023 UTME has been fixed for April 29, 2023, and is expected to end on May 12, 2023.