…..Says 782,027 Registered Out of 2 Million Candidates In 12 Days
The Registrar, Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Ishaq Oloyede has disclosed that the Board exceeds its 60,000 daily registration for candidates across the country for the ongoing 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) registration.
He stated this while briefing journalists on Friday during the monitoring of registration for the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) in Lagos, adding that this was made possible with some measures put in place for a smoother process this year.
The Registrar explained further that: “This is the first time we will be registering 80,000 plus, yesterday we registered close to 100,000 across the country and this is against the 60,000 per day we budgeted for in our planning but from the third day, we registered 80,000, 90,000 per day and this means we will finish before the stipulated time frame.
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“Now you will see that we have registered 782,027 and 11,553 of them are underage. So you can see that as we are standing here, the system is recording from all over the country. Now, 782,000 plus out of about two million that we are expecting and it is not up to 14 days, it is on Monday that will be our 14th day. So we still have Saturday, Sunday and Monday before it becomes two weeks into our five weeks and we would have crossed one million,” he added.
“In other places, there will be one in a million of them; but as few as they are, we should not close the door on them. That is why we wanted to start by saying if you are not 16, you can not register, but we then felt that how do we identify the few individuals? Maybe there will be 30-40 of them in the whole country; so we then felt that if you are underage and you feel you are exceptional, then you should register.
Those who are whether underage or overage and are not ready for admission but they don’t have their school certificate, but they just want to try because of the computer based test; we also created an avenue for them.
Presently, as at today, we have registered 782,027 candidates; this is the second week, the 12th day of the registration and we have registered 782,027. But surprisingly, 11,553 of them are underage. When you are expecting 30 to 40, you can see the difference. Even today alone, we have 443 underage. So that’s the motive, we can look through all of them and decide on who and who is really underage and gifted.
He however added that while JAMB had initially allowed exceptionally brilliant candidates below 16 years to register, the privilege is now being abused. “That is why there will be stiff penalties for underage applicants during this year’s registration.
“We will impose some other penalty on them that it will have been better for them to have stayed for their time because they are going to waste their money.
Oloyede also spoke on the need for parents to be aware that the examination is not school based but an individual exam and should not allow schools to be registering and extorting them.
“As far as I am concerned, we are not school based, so if a child should refuse, then he can go out to register, because this schools apart from extorting candidates, they also do some funny things; mix up their data and give what belongs to A to B and at the end of the day, the students are the victims. So I do not know why a parent will allow schools to be registering and extorting them. So we are not school based, we are individual based.”
BV.
