CITIZENS COMPASS –The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB), said it has apprehended a father caught writing the examination for his son during the ongoing Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
It discloses that it has improved its technology check for those engaging in all forms of examination malpractices.
Speaking in Kaduna on Wednesday, the JAMB Registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede who inspected the UTME centres in Kaduna, expressed satisfaction over the 2024 examination, which had 1.94 million students this year.
He, however, frowned at a few cases of impersonation, adding that some people now have multiple National Identity Numbers (NIN) which the examination body would take up with the Identification Management body.
He said, “For those who engage in cheating, they should know that it does not pay. The technology is helping us to check that…Across the country, most of the problem we have is impersonation. For instance now, we say we have NIN, we now have cases of people with two NIN and therefore, that has defeated the purpose of identity verification. We are going to take that up with NIMC, that there are people who have two NIN.”
“We have a case of a father impersonating his son, writing an examination for the son and I wonder, are you not destroying your son’s future? Of course, two of them are now in custody. I can’t understand what the father will now tell his son when they are both locked up in the same cell. This definitely did not happen in Kaduna, but I don’t want to disclose the state.”
“So, it is largely a case of impersonation, but we are ahead of them; we are just picking them up like chicken now, because the facilities are there for us to see what they are doing and to pick them up. And even those that we have left for research purposes, they will see what will happen after the exams.”
“Most of those candidates who missed the UTME are students from hostels who were made to register through schools because of the money the schools want to collect from the parents in the name of JAMB, would now put 30 students in one bus.
They will now be dropping them in different locations. By the time they get to the last student’s centre, he is already late for the exam. You will now see principal writing to me. What business do I have with a school?
“Even a religious body wrote to me that, oh, the following 100 candidates, I want them to write their exams on a particular day of the examination. They were even deciding for me the school to post the candidates. How is that possible? I will ask the candidates, why did you submit your registration number to a third party that is writing to me, when the person is not a candidate. And you know as a candidate that you have a right to write to JAMB directly. But, they allow third party who will lie on their behalf to contact JAMB,” he said.
He said JAMB needs support of highly populated states like Lagos, to build mega CBT centres like that of Kaduna, which accommodates 4,000 candidates per day.
“If we can have two or three of such CBT Centres across the country, most of our challenges would be over. And we have the resources to build it. We only require the state governments to provide the land.”
“We require this type of centre in Lagos too, but we have put enough pressure on the authorities in Lagos, but they have not given us the desired response. You can see the relive this centre that, Kaduna State Government provided land for, is giving us. Kaduna government provided us the land and we expended from the public fund more than N1.4billion to build those four centres and you can see, they are sitting 1,100 candidates at a time, which means, in two days, you would have done exam for 8,000 candidates.”
He expressed hope that the authorities in Lagos would provide a suitable land for JAMB to build the Mega CBT centre in the city.
