Yinka Kolawole in Osogbo
The Registrar, Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof Isiaq Oloyede, at the weekend disclosed that about 789 students had been impersonated in the course of registration for this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination in the country.
The registrar also stressed that impersonation was done by instead of putting the ten fingers of the candidate, they would go there to pay some people to register several fingers, so that any of them can enter into the examination hall.
Professor Oloyede, who spoke during an inspection tour of some JAMB Computer-based Centres in Osogbo, Osun State capital, at the weekend said: “After we have blocked that, they have now engaged CBT workers who will work with centres, and innocently, the centres may not pay them well not knowing they are impersonator, so he will now come with his own students and he put his fingers and register his own fingers along with the fingers of the candidate.
Oloyede opined that by God’s grace, “JAMB is picking them up, and we have enough intelligence to detect them, and we arrest them.”
\“There is no shortcut to success in UTME, the only route to success is to study hard and go through the right channel.”
Oloyede also informed journalists that the inspection was to ensure that there was no extortion of any clients.
According to him, “You know that in the past, candidates complained of extortion but you can see we made it almost impossible for them to do so. We have deployed both human and technological means of detecting violation, you can see that the issue of no signal is not happening this year, so what we are doing is improving what we did last year, and that is why we are available in every part of the country to monitor strict compliance with the regulation.”
He stated that one-month registration window for this year’s UTME would end on February 14, and further affirmed that there would not be any extension of time for the registration for this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination.
However, the JAMB boss explained that registration pin could be bought through money transfer and not necessarily by taking cash to the registration centre.
He said: “I go around the country to monitor the registration exercise and particularly call attention of those committing infractions. We receive reports about what is going on in the state, we have intelligence on ground, so when we are told, like you saw what happen with the Osun State College of Education, once you have the information, we now go there, if it requires my going there with my officials, I will.”
