2020 UTME won’t be suspended over coronavirus –Prof Oloyede, JAMB Registrar

By brightaVerified active member • 4 hrs ago • 1826 • 731

The Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, Prof Is-haq Oloyede, speaks on the conduct of the 2020 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination so far and other issues in this interview with OLALEYE ALUKO I think that was the major hitch. Yes, we had examination malpractices but they have reduced. We are now also having new dimensions of malpractices whereby people boldly impersonate others. This is because they could not engage in most of the malpractices they were engaging in before. Now, you have a man impersonating a woman and so on and so forth. We believe we will also address these challenges.

We want to find out how people were able to boldly impersonate others, how a man was able to impersonate a woman; but we are going to deal with that. Apart from what happened on Monday which was a hitch, we have 666 Computer-Based Test Centres and so far, only six of them were not able to function. We have therefore delisted and blacklisted them.



Some candidates have alleged that the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board posted them to examination centres and towns far away from their homes. Why is this so?

You see, many people misinterpret what we call examination towns. No candidate is posted to a town other than the town they had chosen at the time of registration. But what constitutes an examination town is another thing. For example, I am not familiar with Abuja because I am a stranger in Abuja, so let me use Lagos, Ogun or others as examples.



Then you also have Lagos Island as an examination town where you have Ikoyi, Lekki and the rest. It is only Badagry, Epe and Ikorodu that we have taken individually as examination towns.



Also for example, on your way to Lagos from Ibadan, you have Mowe, Ibafo and other areas. Mowe and Ibafo used to be one examination town and we have just two CBT centres in both of them, so candidates knew that they would be in either of the two and they could connive with the centres for malpractices. But now, we have merged Mowe, Ibafo with Sagamu and Magboro and all those places, so that once you pick that bloc, you can go to any of the centres in it.



It is to widen the size of the examination town. It is done in such a way that candidates would have to go and speak to four or more CBT centres before they can prearrange to engage in examination malpractices. So, we are not posting people arbitrarily. I challenge anybody to print out the registration slip of their child and see where the child was posted to. You can never find anywhere other than within the place that the candidate has chosen.

You mentioned that six out of your CBT centres had hitches during the UTME and have been blacklisted. What will happen to the candidates affected by those centres?










The Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination started last Saturday; and there were hitches. What would be your general assessment?

So far, it has been good except that there were some human factors. On Monday, we had what I can call an administrative error. That Monday was the second day of the examination and many technical officers, instead of entering 201, that is, second day, first session, they continued with the previous numbering, using 103. So it took some time before we could understand what was happening and when we did, we rectified it and reversed to 201 instead of 103 or 203 they had entered.

Ok