JAMB to Penalise Applicants Who Wrongly Claim Underage 

Oluchi Chibuzor

The Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, has pledged that the board will penalise any applicant who wrongly claims underage during the ongoing Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) registration.

Oloyede stated this yesterday when he visited some computer-based test (CBT) centres in Lagos.
The JAMB boss warned applicants who claimed underage that they would be penalised for wasting the resources of the board.

According to him, “As of today, we have registered 780,202. This is the second week, the 10th day of the registration and you know it’s live. So that is figure at this moment, but surprisingly 11,512 of them are underage.
“When you are expecting 30 to 40, you can see the deceit. Today alone, we have registered 18,813 so far and out of the 18,813, 443 of them are underage and that’s part of the introduction this year that we could have those who are underage. We could see what their problems were, we could pick from among them those who are sincerely underage and gifted.”

According to him, the global standard for exceptional students is one in a million.
“You know you have world standards, ordinarily it’s about one in a million. So when people give examples, how many of them do you have in the whole of America, in the whole of Canada that you are referring to? Is one in a million.

“We want to get them up, we want to see them but not these fake figures that people are just parading, people cannot even score 200 over 400. Simply because their parents had no time for them and enrolled them underage in primary school and so on, did some funny things to get them to SS2. Some of them buy certificates and so on, that’s what some of the parents do.”

“Those we call candidates are those who are 16 and above, these ones are not candidates, we are not regarding them as candidates, they need to prove that they are candidates. But if we now find out that you cannot prove your age, we will impose some penalties on them and it would have been better for them to have waited for their time, because they are going to waste our money,” Oloyede said.