OVER 500,000 tertiary institutions admission seekers have so far registered to sit for the 2022 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, has said.
Prof Ishaq Oloyede, JAMB’s Registrar, revealed on Thursday, adding that the target is to register a total of 1.5 million candidates before the March 26, 2022 deadline when registration would close.
Prof Oloyede, who spoke while monitoring the registration exercise in Bwari, Abuja, said the board also plans to register at least 50,000 candidates per day. According to him, JAMB has so far succeeded in registering about 70,000 two days ago, adding that the exercise has been mostly successful and 99% of the problems encountered by candidates were self-inflicted because they played into the hands of fraudsters.
While appealing to non-candidates to keep off registration centres, he urged parents to allow their children to read the registration instructions and follow, warning candidates not to divulge their codes to third parties as fraudsters could use them to manipulate their profiles to their own detriment.
“So far so good, we have registered over five hundred candidates. We are expecting about 1.5 million or thereabout. We still have more than twelve days to go. And if things continue to move smoothly, we plan to register 50 thousand per day. Two days ago, it was over seventy thousand per day. We believe today we should be able to register seventy thousand. Yesterday there was a little glitch in the system.
“I am happy you were able to talk to candidates who had problems. You saw that 99 per cent of the problems are self-inflicted and it is because they play into the hands of fraudsters. You can see the gentleman who said he was just a do-gooder and was doing a wrong thing on their profile. He will cease the profile and they would go back to check, blackmailed them,” he said.
Speaking on the quality of CBT test administered by JAMB, Prof Oloyede said: “Which of the biometric centres are they using that is as good as this one you have seen here? And yet we do it at N3,500 yet people are still not complying with simple instructions. You can see that everything is going on well.
“Even outside Nigeria, West African College of Physicians and West African College of Surgeons, people from outside the country, are coming here to patronise us because we are doing the right thing for them. So, if the quality of work is not good, they wouldn’t be coming from all over.
On those whose SIMs are missing, he said JAMB is doing something about it but cautiously, in order not to open up candidates to manipulation by fraudsters.
“We are working with the telcos in such a way that when that happens, we are putting a system in place, telephone update, where you would use your thumbprint to show that it was the same thumbprint then we would allow the system to change to another SIM for you.
“But if at the point of testing your thumbs, the fingerprints are not coming up, we would leave you to go back and get your welcome back. We are doing this but we have to do it with caution because that can open students to unnecessary exposure of their personal data.
“We are not asking them to wait we are saying, we are looking into the possibility of what we can do. He added that JAMB will talk to all agencies involved in the registration process as if you register in your name, it is beyond JAMB, because every candidate has been marked, not only with the registration number but with the phone,” he said.
According to Oloyede, “It is like doing internet banking. The phone number with which you are doing internet banking is very critical to your banking. If you just flippantly change the number and you give instruction from another phone, you know the damage that you would do.
“The phone is a marker and once the phone is misplaced, please go and get it replaced and when you get it replaced there must be a procedure to get you into our system so that you don’t replace somebody wrongly.
He said the board has found three or four vendors wanting and are currently undergoing interactions with the appropriate office, adding that some of the directors are interrogating the vendors and once JAMB is convinced that they have done the wrong thing, it would blacklist the agents and also warn the vendor.
On the new approach of candidates filling and submitting hardcopy forms before commencing registration, he said the new method was introduced because candidates come and waste a lot of money trying to change correct names and when you ask them, they say though I approved of it but I was not the one who type.
He added that after filling the form, candidates must confirm that everything is right and the form would be uploaded in the candidate’s handwriting, which explains why at registration points, JAMB has double screens, one facing the candidate and the other facing the official carrying out the registration.
