The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) says that it has registered at least 1.6 million candidates for the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
This is as the examination body pointed out that the sale of the UTME forms would end on Wednesday, February 22, 2023, following a one-week extension of the initial deadline.
This was disclosed by the JAMB Registrar, Ishaq Oloyede, on Monday, at the end of a joint monitoring exercise with the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education, David Adajo at the Global Distance Learning, Abuja.
Oloyede, however, disclosed that in the cause of registration, 15 people were discovered to be defrauding the process and went against the conduct of the UTME registration processes, adding that the culprits have been apprehended and were currently detained.
Why the registration deadline was extended
- Oloyede said, “So far we have registered 1.6 million (that is one million, six hundred thousand candidates.”
The permanent secretary explained that the extension was necessary to ensure all the candidates have time to register.
- He said, “Ordinarily, registration for UTME has closed but to take care of people that could, for one reason or another not be able to make the deadline of February 14th, especially as you know, most of the registration processes depend on banks and we could not have top level bank operations from the past three weeks for understandable reasons.
- “Here the turnout is very low because the first set of registration that ended on February 14th had virtually captured more than 98 percent of people so the people that are being captured now are those that are left over.
- “Today, for instance, we only met three people. We asked the head of this center how many were registered on Saturday and he said about 15 so I think the monitoring gave us the confidence that yes it was a good idea to extend so we don’t leave anybody out of the box.”
For the record
- JAMB commenced the sale of the 2023 UTME on January 14, 2023, and was expected to close on February 14, 2023.
- However, to ensure every candidate gets carried along, the Board extended the registration exercise by one week, starting from Wednesday, 15th February 2023.
- The examination body said that the conduct of its optional mock UTME is to take place on March 16, 2023. It, however, noted that the registration does not include Direct Entry (DE) application documents as the DE registration would commence from February 20 to April 20, 2023.
- The conduct of the 2023 UTME has been fixed for April 29, 2023, and is expected to end on May 12, 2023.
