The Joint Admissions Matriculation Board has warned secondary school principals against approaching it with complaints about their students missing the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
This is as it declared that the UTME is not a school-based examination, expressing that the Board would not be responsible for any failure of registered candidates caused by their schools.
The JAMB Registrar, Ishaq Oloyede declared this during the week while conducting an assessment of the examination conduct at the Kaduna State University CBT Centre, Kaduna.
Professor Oloyede said, “Most of those candidates who missed the UTME are students from hostels who were made to register through schools, because of the money the schools want to collect from the parents in the name of JAMB.
“Now those schools would now put 30 students in one bus and be dropping them in different locations.
“By the time they get to the last student’s centre, he is already late for the exam. You will now see the principal writing to me. What business do I have with a school?”
Oloyede used the opportunity to inform those who missed the exam for reasons not caused by the examination body to forget about it.
“JAMB cannot spend tens of millions of the nation’s resources to reorganise a session for a few candidates who missed the exams due to their personal recklessness,” he said.
EduCeleb.com earlier reported that a father was caught impersonating his son to write the UTME.
The JAMB boss stated that the duo had been arrested.
“We have a case of a father impersonating his son, writing an examination for the son and, I wonder: are you not destroying your son’s future? Of course, two of them are now in custody.
“I can’t understand what the father will now tell his son when they are both locked up in the same cell. This definitely did not happen in Kaduna, but I don’t want to disclose the state.
He said no fewer than 1.94 million candidates sat for the 2024 UTME across the country.
Double NIN registrations and possible impersonation
He disclosed that the board detected cases of people with two National Identification Numbers in the ongoing UTME thus opening the possibility of impersonation.
As a result of the development, the JAMB boss said the board would take it up with the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC).
“Across the country, most of the problem we have is impersonation. For instance, now, we say we have NIN, we now have cases of people with two NINs and, therefore, that has defeated the purpose of identity verification.
“We are going to take that up with NIMC, that there are people who have two NINs.
“So, it is largely a case of impersonation, but we are ahead of them; we are just picking them up like chickens now because the facilities are there for us to see what they are doing and to pick them up,” he said.
Technology efficient
Oloyede added that the board’s deployment of improved technology made the exercise smoother and faster.
“Today, I have seen something which we need to improve on, but most importantly, we have done so many things in the background to make the exercise faster, more efficient and better.
The JAMB boss frowned on those who cheated during the examinations, declaring that “cheating does not pay.”
Parents commended
Meanwhile, the JAMB Registrar has commended parents for their conduct during the 2024 UTME exercise, noting that there was no intrusion, unlike the previous year when some parents flocked to the various CBT centres.
“There is no report this year of parents intruding, except one state. In that state, they felt since the first session failed, their children should not continue with the second or other sessions,” he added.
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