JAMB Insists on March 26 Exam Date

Kuni Tyessi

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has reiterated that it would close the registration exercise for 2022 matriculation examination on Saturday, March 26.

The board made this known yesterday in its Weekly Bulletin of the Office of the Registrar, in Abuja.

The JAMB said that it would not extend the sale of e-PINs for its Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) and Direct Entry (DE), beyond Saturday March 26.

It said: “This emphasis is essential because of the persistent drop in the number of e-PINs being vended, as well as the low turnout of candidates at the various centres across the nation. “As discussed earlier, registration dates are not fixed arbitrarily but through a consensus of the Federal Ministry of Education and examination agencies, before the commencement of the exercise. Therefore, all candidates who desired to register for this year’s examination are to do so immediately, as they only have this week and no extension would be granted after close of registration,”

The board, however, said that it had so far registered 1,512,739 candidates as at Saturday, March 19. It added that it had also remitted N261, 992, 200 to accredited Computer Based Tests (CBT) centres and the N700 accumulated service charge for the fourth week of the exercise.

JAMB said that the cashless policy was introduced to curb the excess of some fraudulent CBT centres, who would want to take advantage of hapless candidates.

It promised to remit to the centres, the accumulated N700 service charge on a weekly basis, proportional to the number of candidates they registered. In a similar development, the board said that it had suspended two financial institutions who were also vendors in its ongoing exercise.

JAMB said that the vendors were also blacklisted for allowing their agents to vend UTME e-PINs to candidates, above the stipulated price of N4,700 cost of registration. The board said that besides blacklisting the vendors, it would retrieve the details of the agents for prosecution.

It would also report their illicit act to the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, to ensure that their victims were fully refunded.