By Felix Khanoba
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has directed Computer Based Test (CBT) centres engaged in the ongoing registration for 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) to stop bulk registration of students from a given school/place and the mass purchase of e-PIN by a single individual.
Registrar/Chief Executive of JAMB, Professor Is-haq Oloyede, who made this known while monitoring the registration exercise at some CBT centres in Abuja on Saturday, said any bulk registration must get approval from the examination body.
While expressing concerns over the extortion attitude of some schools that charge students above the stipulated N5,700 UTME registration fee, Oloyede said some made their students to pay as high as N30,000, with many engaging in bulk registration at accredited CBT centres.
His words : “Registration is going on well except some of these schools.
“UTME is not a school-based examination, it’s individual candidates and you can see what that school, Stella Maris is doing, collecting N30,000 from candidates in the name of JAMB and then end up missing up the telephone number of the candidates
“So once they keep the telephone number of candidates, it is unlikely that the candidates when we are contacting them-if we want to make a change in their timetable, you send text to them (the students) and it will not get to them, and after they have graduated from the school and want to do change of course they don’t have access to it.
“And that is a way of extorting the parents, and we will take adequate steps to make sure that we stop that. One of the reasons is that we will tell every CBT centre to stop doing bulk purchase of pin and bulk registration, so if a centre sales more than one pin to a source or collect money for more than one pin from a source then we will sanction such centre.”
Oloyede urged candidates to report cases of extortion, saying that there is a code for candidates to reach the board when they come across any case of extortion, while promising there will be a reward for such act.
On the number of students that have so far registered for the 2023 UTME, the JAMB boss said about 1.16 million candidates have put in for the examination.
He, however, revealed that the board would not extend deadline for the 2023 UTME registration, which is set to close on Tuesday, 14th February, 2023.
The AUTHORITY reports that during monitoring exercise which took the JAMB boss to CBT centres located at Total Child International School, Dutse-Makaranta, JAMB Abuja zonal office, Life Camp, Global Distance Learning Institute and Sascon International College, a teacher who admitted that his school collected N7000 from students for the UTME registration, was arrested to ensure a proper investigation of the issue.
