The Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, said that JAMB generated N12bn as income in 2017.
He added that after deducting its expenses, it remitted N7.8bn to the Federal Government.
Oloyede spoke during a media briefing in Ilorin, the Kwara State capital, on Monday.
According to him, the board was able to remit the huge amount of money to the Federal Government because it blocked loopholes and checked wastages.
He stated that though JAMB was not a money-generating agency, it was also not a money-wasting establishment.
The registrar said 1.7 million candidates sat for the last UTME in addition to over 200,000 of direct candidates, adding that said the board was expecting two million candidates to sit for the examination in 2018.
Oloyede stated that most of the first-class graduates from the nation’s universities were not exceptional but merely scored average marks in their Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination.
He said the board took statistics of the first-class graduates across the nation’s universities.
According to him, the findings showed that about 80 per cent of the graduates scored below 200 in the UTME they sat for while applying for admission to the university.
He explained that the cut-off mark that JAMB put at 120 for 2017/2018 admission was a benchmark for admission of candidates and not a score for automatic admission.
He said, “There have been instances where candidates with poorer scores were dropped to less competitive courses but later crossed to the more competitive ones and emerged as the best during their graduation, in those courses.
“Some affiliated institutions were urging reduction of cut-off marks adopted by their parent universities. The affiliates had approached the Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu Adamu, to ask JAMB to prevail on the universities to reduce the cut-off marks. The affiliates were complaining that they were finding it difficult to get candidates to admit with the cut-off marks.”
He added, “The board had also devised means to check unscrupulous activities of candidates who do multiple registrations by deliberately writing their names wrongly with the intention to claim the result of the one with the highest score and thereafter demand correction of the name claiming that the fault is not theirs.”
“Another technological means was devised to check cyber cafe operators from exploiting candidates who register for the UTME in their cafes while the Central Admission Processing System was introduced to ease processes of admission of qualified candidates.”
