JAMB Arrests Impersonators, Announces UTME Results

Funmi Ogundare

The Registrar of Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Professor Ishaq Oloyede, thursday announced the release of the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination(UTME) results it conducted last weekend.
The announcement came as Oloyede expressed regret over activities of some ‘mushroom’ CBT centres which deceived Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination(UTME) candidates with the motive of defrauding them.

The Registrar who was in JKK Computer Based Test (CBT) Centre, Lagos, yesterday for an on-the-spot assessment of the examination, disclosed that two persons who connived with some of the mushroom CBT centres and collected a high amount of money from the candidates had been arrested for impersonation, adding that the board discovered the irregularities at the point of biometric capturing.

According to him, “ Many of those mushroom centres do not deserve to be heard because they established CBT centre in order to defraud the innocent candidates. We have seen cases of some of them conniving with the candidates and giving them fake questions and when candidates get to the examination hall, they will encounter problems. What is also important to me is that those being defrauded deserve no sympathy. We still have a long way to go.”
He noted that he believes that one fundamental mistake that people make is for tutorial centres that train students for UTME to also register them for CBT, saying: “ I think it’s a major error on our part, because they do everything possible to make sure that they attract customers. . They now have VIP rooms, where they connect a cable to a special room and collect a lot of money from the special candidates. While we are in the hall conducting the examination, we will not know such, and that was why we had to create an avenue from our server to monitor how many people are writing the examination. What we discovered is that they will be physically there but they are doing nothing. It is the people who are in the VIP rooms that are doing the examination for the VIP sitting in the hall and pretending to be writing the examination.

“It is one of the reasons I visited JKK so that we can put our heads together and see whether or not to eliminate some of these mushroom centres which are there to make illegal money. For us, the sanctity and integrity of the examination really matter to us . That is why we have terminated all the means that they employ.”

Oloyede also used the opportunity to announce the results of candidates who sat for UTME between last Monday and Wednesday saying: “As at today, 1,648,429 candidates had taken our examination, and we have released the results of 1, 048914.

“On the first day we released the results last Sunday to give us the opportunity of releasing another results as soon as the candidates submits, but for some environmental reasons, we don’t release the results immediately to ensure that we monitor the CCTV camera to see what has happened.

“We want to see whether there have been incidents of malpractices, and prevent a situation that those who did not pass will become agitated at the CBT centre. So far, we have released results of the examination conducted last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and by God’s grace, as soon as the last person submits in Osun State, we will release the results by 12 midnight (Thursday).”