JAMB registrar: UTME to hold in May — but we can’t promise hitch-free exam

Ishaq Oloyede, registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), on Wednesday said the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) will take place in May.

He said JAMB cancelled the use of scratch cards because of the rampant cases of candidates being defrauded.

Oloyede said the examination was delayed so as to have an effective payment process and so as to avoid a clash with other national examinations.

“For the 2017 UTME, we have taken a decision to commence the sale of the form soon. Within the next two weeks, we will be out. The reason for this is that we are making all arrangements that ought to be made. We have changed the process of payment, no more scratch card selling. We need to put the right architecture in place and we have put this in place,” said Oloyede.

“The examination will be coming up later than usual. This is to make sure we take into consideration the interest of the students. We are going to conduct the UTME in May. It will not clash with any SSCE examinations.

“Normally, we conduct our examinations around March and the results will be ready within two to three days. But when do we need the results? It is always between July and August. This gives room for all forms of suspicion. If you go on the net, you will see people claiming that they could help candidates to upgrade their results because the results are lying fallow between March and July.

“Now we want to shorten the period in such a way that the time between the examination and when the results will be used will be very short. There will be no opportunity for anybody to even dream of upgrading results.

“We are also using that opportunity to communicate with other Examination bodies like WAEC, NECO and NABTEB to ensure that we do not make our examinations mutually exclusive. Somebody is taking WAEC examinations, he wants to take JAMB but in some cases due to clash of timetable, he wants to sacrifice one for the other.

“So, we have harmonized in such a way that the period we are going to use for our examination, all other examination bodies will not have examinations during the period.

He further noted that JAMB cannot promise a hitch-free process, largely because of the “re-engineering” it is carrying out.

“I or the management will not promise a hitch-free examination because when you are doing the type of re-engineering we are doing, you cannot say that there will be no hitches. But we believe that we are on top of it and whatever problem arises, we will solve it.

“Everybody will however have fair treatment and everybody will be well-treated. This is what I can assure Nigerians.”

The registrar said the agency expects about 1.7 million candidates to sit for its exams this year.

He proceeded to give a breakdown.

“We expect about 1.5million candidates for UTME and about 200,000 and 300,000 candidates for Direct Entry. That was how we arrived at the figure and that is the figure we are also expecting, “he said.