UTME: Parents call me to favour their children who failed – JAMB Registrar, Oloyede

Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, Registrar, Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB), says malpractice and indiscipline are some of the board’s major challenges yet to be fully addressed.

The Registrar made this known when members of the Senate Committee on Basic and Secondary Education visited the board’s headquarters in Bwari, Abuja on Monday.

Oloyede said that the challenges, unfortunately, were mostly with regards to parents trying to bend the system by all means and get their wards or children into schools, irrespective of their performance.

“Our challenge remains examination malpractice, especially with regards to parents who keep calling me to favour their wards or children whether they meet the requirements of the system or not.

“There’s also indiscipline from the tertiary institutions who admit against the Federal Government’s policy guidelines as mandated by the Ministry of Education.

“At the end of the day, after admitting outside these policies, they put pressure on students at the final moments towards graduation to come back to us for what they call regularisation,” he said.

”We also have the same challenge from some private sectors and dubious Computer Based Test (CBT) centres too and we are really putting efforts to curb this.”

The Registrar said that the number of registered candidates for 2021 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) was not up to 1.4 million, a low figure, when compared to 2.2 million in 2020.

He noted, however, that the mandatory use of National Identity Number (NIN) helped the board to curb some of the malpractices usually encountered during the UTME registration.

Oloyede said the malpractices included multiple and fraudulent registration by candidates with irregular credentials.

He said that during the 2021 examination, the board’s challenge shifted to security operatives attached to some of the centres, whom he said allegedly smuggled fraudulent candidates into the examination hall.

“Even after they dodge the verification process where of course the system would have identified them through their pictures, the cameras at the centres immediately picked them and we were able to apprehend them.

“That was when some of them said either their parents gave the security operatives money to let them in or the candidates themselves bribed their way in.

”So whether we like it or not, NIN helped us curb some of these challenges at both the registration and examination exercise,” he added.

On JAMB’S budget performance for 2020, the Registrar noted that the board remitted N4.1 billion to the Federal Government confers, stating that staff welfare was paramount and they were adequately taken care of.