The 2015 Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB)-organised Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) commences Tuesday (today) in 400 centres nationwide with over 1.47 million candidates writing the examination.
The maiden wholly Computer-Based Test (CBT), which starts Tuesday, March 10, 2015 and runs through Saturday, March 21, will be written in Nigeria and seven foreign countries, namely Ghana, Cameroun, Republic of Benin, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Ethiopia. The examination, which has witnessed a decrease of about 156, 695 in the number of applicants compared to that of 2014, also has 208 jailbirds vying for slots in tertiary institutions.
Twenty-eight of the prisoners are quartered at Ikoyi Prisons, Lagos. Imo State has the highest number of applicants with 104,381 and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) has the lowest with just 4,085. However, not all candidates that registered for the examination would write same owing to logistical lapses on the part of the organisers and the inability of some of the applicants to stick to set guidelines.
When The Guardian visited JAMB’s accredited CBT centre at Ilupeju Monday, some applicants who ostensibly registered through cyber cafes not approved by JAMB were seen loitering around the facility, and in possession of registration numbers, which JAMB claimed were alien to it.
A JAMB official, who also supervised the centre, Mr. Kunle Makinde, told The Guardian that the affected candidates failed to follow JAMB’s guidelines, saying: “Candidates are meant to collect a brochure and a customised compact disc at the point of purchase of their scratch cards. All the information about accredited JAMB CBT centres are contained in it. They are supposed to read it or visit the JAMB website before commencement of registration.”
When asked how the conditions of the affected applicants could be remedied to enable them write the examination, he retorted: “I’m afraid, nothing can be done as it is because they are now like candidates who failed to register. The implication is that there is no way they can sit for the examination, as their data are not in JAMB server. The e-slip they have is a fake one. If you register where you are not supposed to register, it means we do not have your information on our server and they will have to wait till next year.
“The difference between the original and fake e-slip is that if you have the original, the serial number and the pin number must appear on the e-slip.” If this is not the case, the e-slip is fake.”
Besides, the administrator of the centre, Mrs. Margaret Ebere, who stated that the centre is ever ready for the examination, said: “This is an e-test company, we did it last year successfully and we are doing it again. We are not foreseeing any challenge because we have three power generating sets as well as an inverter where all the computers are connected. Guardian
