The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board on Thursday said more than 500,000 candidates have successfully registered nationwide for the 2022 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) and Direct Entry (DE) about 13 days into the registration exercise.
Registrar of JAMB, Professor Is-haq Oloyede, led a team of officials of the Board to monitor the registration exercise in some Computer Based Test (CBT) Centres in Abuja.
He noted that in many registration centres across the country, the exercise has been going on smoothly except for little glitches with the system, especially network problems in some places, saying however that this year’s registration process was an improvement over the previous ones, having put into consideration some of the challenges and complaints of candidates in the past.
Oloyede said: “So far so good, we have registered about 500,000 candidates. We are expecting about 1.5 million candidates or thereabout. We still have more than 12 days to go.
“If things continue to go smoothly, we planned to register 50,000 per day, the day before yesterday, it was over 70,000 per day, we believe today we should be able to register 70,000. Yesterday, there was a little glitch on the system,” he said.
Oloyede took time during the monitoring exercise to interrogate prospective candidates who could not proceed with registration because of challenges in generating code from the National Identify Management Commission (NIMC), among other issues.
“But you have seen what is happening now, that is why I’m happy that you are here and able to talk to candidates who have problems. You saw that 99% of the problems are self-inflicted and it is because they play into the hands of fraudsters,” he said.
He was particularly worried about a young man who claimed upon interrogation at the Kogo CBT Centre, Bwarri, that he was a “do-gooder” but was doing the wrong thing on the profile of the prospective candidates.
He appealed to non-candidates to keep off the exercise while also calling on the parents to allow their children to read the instructions and follow them, insisting that most of the problems faced by candidates are self-made.
The Registrar, however, disclosed that four vendors who were found wanting are currently being interrogated by the appropriate office, vowing to blacklist their agents if the Board is convinced of their involvement in underhand dealings.
Speaking on the quality of CBT test administered by JAMB, “which of the biometric centres are they using that is as good as this one you have seen here? And yet we do it at N3,500 yet people are still not complying with simple instructions. You can see that everything is going on well.
“Even outside Nigeria, West African College of Physicians and West African College of Surgeons, people from outside the country are coming here to patronise us because we are doing the right thing for them. So, if the quality of work is not good, they wouldn’t be coming from all over.
On those whose SIMs are missing, he said JAMB is doing something about it but cautiously, in order not to open up candidates to manipulation by fraudsters.
“We are working with the telcos in such a way that when that happens, we are putting a system in place, telephone update, where you would use your thumbprint to show that it was the same thumbprint then we would allow the system to change to another sim for you.
“But if at the point of testing your thumbs, the fingerprints are not coming up, we would leave you to go back and get your welcome back. We are doing this but we have to do it with caution because that can open students to unnecessary exposure of their personal data.
“We are not asking them to wait we are saying, we are looking into the possibility of what we can do. He added that JAMB will talk to all agencies involved in the registration process as if you register in your name, it is beyond JAMB, because every candidate has been marked, not only with the registration number but with the phone,” he said.
According to Oloyede, “It is like doing internet banking. The phone number with which you are doing internet banking is very critical to your banking. If you just flippantly change the number and you give instruction from another phone, you know the damage that you would do.
“The phone is a marker and once the phone is misplaced, please go and get it replaced and when you get it replaced there must be a procedure to get you into our system so that you don’t replace somebody wrongly.
On the new approach of candidates filling and submitting hardcopy forms before commencing registration, he said the new method was introduced because candidates come and waste a lot of money trying to change correct names and when you ask them, they say though I approved it; but I was not the one who typed it.
He added that after filling the form, candidates must confirm that everything is right and the form would be uploaded in the candidate’s handwriting, which explains why at registration points, JAMB has double screens, one facing the candidate and the other facing the official carrying out the registration.
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