JAMB nabs UTME candidate for upgrading result

THE Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB) has apprehended another candidate in the 2019 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) for upgrading his scores 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 by his friend.

JAMB Registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, handed Kingsley over to the police for prosecution after the panel’s investigation.

Trouble started when Kingsley’s parents petitioned JAMB for reducing their son’s UTME score from 269 to 201 and demanded that it should be corrected to enable their child to meet up with the requirement to study medicine in the university.

The board, sensing something fishy, invited the candidate to its headquarters in Bwari  Abuja, so as to address the issue. He was accompanied by the mother from Awka, Anambra State.

When interrogated, Kingsley confirmed that the aggregate score sent to him from JAMB in text message was 201. He said he was surprised when his friend, after sending a code to JAMB using his (Kingsley’s) phone, showed him that his score was 269.

According to him, he forwarded the 269 to his mother and the fake score was printed to process his admission.

The suspect, however, said that when he was called for post-UTME test, what was displayed as his score was 201 from JAMB. This infuriated the parents who were ignorant of the fake upgrade of the result by their son and insisted that JAMB corrected the error in the result released to the child.

The mother, after being given opportunity by the panel to confer with her son outside the hall,  apologised. She said 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, rejected the admission on the ground that the child must study medicine.

He said his inability to meet up with the cut-off point for medicine made him to hide his result from his 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 screen shot.

“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. He now said okay, I should leave till next day.

“The next day, I still saw 201. I was now confused. When my parents asked again, I showed the 269.”