The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, says tomorrow’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, would hold in 605 Computer Base Test, CBT, centres which have already been approved across the country.
The JAMB registrar, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, who spoke in Abuja yesterday, stated that the board would pay N600 per candidate to write the examination at any approved CBT centre, adding that the payment was to discourage candidates from paying any amount to examination centres.
He said, “At the end of the two months application window, we realised that 1,662,763 candidates registered for the 2018 exam. This was contrary to 1,718,425 candidates that registered for same exam within a month and two weeks period in 2017.
“A total of three hundred and sixty-seven virtually impaired candidates registered for this year’s examination as against the 201 last year.
“The board will continue to provide all necessary support and logistics to the physically-challenged candidates for them to attain their educational pursuit. The Equal Opportunity Group under Prof. Okebukola, who assisted last year, will be conducting the examination for the virtually impaired candidates.”
“We will not release the results immediately this year because last year, we wanted to prove a point that there was nothing extraordinary in immediate release but we know that that is not global best practices. Because we had to cancel some results as a result of what we found out later,” Oloyede said.
Recall that operators of Computer-Based Test, CBT, centres yesterday pleaded with JAMB to give them a reasonable timeline to factor in its technical capacity in readiness for the UTME slated to begin this Friday.
Speaking under the aegis of The CBT Centre Proprietors Association of Nigeria, they expressed concern about the marching order given by JAMB to the CBT centre owners to download the board’s software on Sunday.
Chairman of the association, Alexander Ogedengbe, speaking to journalists at the end of its one-day seminar on JAMB UTME 2018 ethics, metrics and technicalities, said, “we will want them to be aware that the time they mandated us to go and download the browser to use for the examination was very short”.
