JAMB registers 1.1m candidates for 2023 UTME

By Linda Ike

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) said over 1.1 million candidates have registered for the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) across Nigeria.

The Registrar of JAMB, Professor Ishaq Oloyede disclosed this on Saturday, when he monitored the ongoing registration exercise in some computer based Test (CBT) centres in Abuja.

He warned centres against extortion of candidates and also said that the Board would not extend deadline for the 2023 Unified UTME registration.

Recalled that the sale of the 2023 UTME commenced on Saturday, January 14, 2023, and plans to close on Tuesday, February 14, 2023.

The registrar visited CBT centre located at Total Child International School, Dutse, JAMB Abuja zonal office, Life Camp, Global Distance Learning Institute and Sascon International College, Abuja.

He said, ” registration is going on very 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 and it will not get to them 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 evey CBT center to stop doing bulk purchase of pin and bulk registration so if a center sales more than one pin to a source or collect money for more than one pin from a source then we will sanction such center.”

While urging the candidates to report cases of extortion to JAMB, Oloyede promised to reward any candidate that reports such act.

He also disclosed that there is a code for candidates to reach the board when they come across any case of extortion.