The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB), has warned that it has improved its technology check for those engaging in all forms of examination malpractices, saying a father was arrested writing the exams for his son during the ongoing Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
Speaking in Kaduna on Wednesday, the JAMB Registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede who inspected the UTME centres in Kaduna, expressed satisfaction over the 2024 examination, which had 1.94 million students this year.
He, however, frowned at few cases of impersonation, adding that some people now have multiple National Identity Number (NIN) which the examination body would take up with the Identification Management body.
“For those who engage in cheating, they should know that it does not pay. The technology is helping us to check that…Across the country, most of the problem we have is impersonation. For instance now, we say we have NIN, we now have cases of people with two NIN and therefore, that has defeated the purpose of identity verification. We are going to take that up with NIMC, that there are people who have two NIN.”
“We have a case of a father impersonating his son, writing examination for the son and I wonder, are you not destroying your son’s future? Of course, two of them are now in custody. I can’t understand what the father will now tell his son when they are both locked up in the same cell. This happened definitely not in Kaduna, but I don’t want to disclose the state.”
“So, it is largely cases of impersonation, but we are ahead of them; we are just picking them up like chicken now, because the facilities are there for us to see what they are doing and to pick them up. And even those that we have left for research purposes, they will see what will happen after the exams.”
“Most of those candidates who missed the UTME are students from hostels who were made to register through schools because of the money the schools want to collect from the parents in the name of JAMB, would now put 30 students in one bus. They will now be dropping them in different locations. By the they get to the last student’s centre, he is already late for the exam. You will now see principal writing to me. What business do I have with a school?
“Even a religious body wrote to me that, oh, the following 100 candidates, I want them to write their exams on a particular day of the examination. They were even deciding for me the school to post the candidates. How is that possible? I will ask the candidates, why did you submit your registration number to a third party that is writing to me, when the person is not a candidate. And you know as a candidate that you have a right to write to JAMB directly. But, they allow third party who will lie on their behalf to contact JAMB,” he said.