THE Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board has apprehended another candidate for 2019 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) for upgrading his score from 201 to 269.
The candidate, Unekwe Kenechukwu Kingsley with JAMB registration number 95176817BA, accompanied by his mother faced a panel of investigation on Friday in Abuja where he confessed to manipulation of the score done by his friend.
JAMB Registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede handed over Kingsley to the police for prosecution after the panel investigation.
Trouble started when Kingsley’s parents unwittingly petitioned JAMB for reducing their son’s UTME score from 269 to 201 and demanded that this should be corrected to enable their child meet up with the requirement to read medicine in a university.
The board sensing something fishy, decided to invite the candidate to come over to its headquarters in Bwari Abuja, so as to properly address the issue. He was accompanied by the mother from Awka, Anambra State.
When he was interrogated, Kingsley confirmed that the aggregate score sent to him from JAMB in a text message was 201. He said he was however surprised when his friend after sending a code to JAMB using his (Kingsley’s) phone and showed to him that his score was 269.
According to his narrative, it was the 269 point that he forwarded to the mother and was printed for use to process his admission.
The suspect, however, said when he was called for the post-UTME test, what was displayed as his score was 201 from JAMB. This infuriated the parents who were ignorant of the illicit upgrade of the result by their son and insisted that JAMB corrected the error in result released to the child.
The mother after given opportunity by the panel to confide with the son outside the hall and return in five minutes, came back apologetic, saying she was dumbfounded by the boy’s revelation that 201 was his actual score.
“I’m really dumbfounded. Had it been he told me all this, we won’t have come here,” she said.
Kingsley told the panel that he was offered admission last academic session to study Geology but his father said to be a professor of Medicine of over 30 years standing rejected the admission on the ground that the child must study medicine.
He said his inability to meet up with the required cut-off point for medicine made him to initially hide his result from the parents.
Kingsley said: “When JAMB released results, people were checking and I was checking mine and nothing was coming out. People were checking and getting their results, so I gave a friend my phone to help me check. When he came, he showed me 269 as a screenshot.
“But when I went to my room and shut my door and checked, I saw 201. I was shocked and checked again, it was 201, that was when my dad called if I had seen my result and I said no, I have not seen it yet. He now said okay, I should leave till the next day.
“The next day, I still see 201. I was now confused. When my parents asked again, I showed them 269.
Oloyede, blamed parents for the increasing rate of examination malpractices in the country, saying the pressure from parents do not allow children to focus on their areas of strength.
He insisted that the suspected would be prosecuted in line with the law of the country, saying his case was the fifth of such candidates caught in attempted result falsification.
The JAMB Registrar said the board was ahead of the fraudsters and decided to release candidates results directly to the institutions of their choices to forestall situation in the past where candidates falsified results and present them to institutions for admissions.
He said the board would meet to withdraw the result while the candidate is being prosecuted to serve as a deterrent to others.
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