THE Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, has cancelled the registration of 817 candidates in the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME.
The cancellation came, following discovery by the nation’s tertiary institutions admission body that the candidates engaged in various forms of irregularities while carrying out the exercise in various Computer Based Centres, CBTs, across the country.
Registrar of JAMB, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, who disclosed this after separate meetings with stakeholders in Abuja, yesterday, said the registrations were invalidated over identified infractions bordering on use of strange biometric fingerprints in the registration process.
While noting that some registration officers in the affected 178 Computer Based Test, CBT, centres added one of their fingerprints to complete the registration process for the candidates, Oloyede, however, said the 817 students would be given another opportunity to re-register for the exam with the centres, bearing the cost.
He said: “For the students who allowed other people to add their fingers to their registration procedure, we found that some of them were only naive, because you will hear them saying my finger was hot, and the man added his own. And you allowed him to add his own?
“Some of them did it deliberately for impersonation but we can’t identify those who are genuine from those who are not genuine. We will cancel all of them, all the registrations and we will ask them to re-register.
“ The centres involved, we have just met with them, and they all confessed, nobody is disputing it, even students that were telling lies know we have the technology that won’t allow any lie to be accommodated.
“ On their own (CBT owners), they suggested the solution. We will cancel the registrations of those people concerned and we will send a message to them to go back to the very centres where they were registered and the CBT centres will pay to the board the cost of registration of the candidates.”
The JAMB boss revealed that allowing a registration officer or any other person to add his or her finger during capturing of a candidate’s biometric data can bring about impersonation in the exam as well as give such ‘strange’ persons access to change vital details including exam centre.
“By adding his or her finger to your registration, it means he or she can change all your particulars when you are not there. You know your finger is what is used to identify you. The person can change your examination centre like say from Lagos to Ibadan, and on the exam day you won’t be able to write the exam.
“That is why we put in place a device that will throw up any strange finger that is not yours and that is why we were able to identify them.’’
SOURCE: Vanguard News Nigeria