JAMB disclosed that OVER 500,000 candidates have so far registered to sit for the 2022 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME.
The board which disclosed this on Thursday, through its registrar, Prof Ishaq Oloyede, said its target was to register a total of 1.5 million candidates before its deadline fixed for March 26, 2022.
Oloyede, who spoke while monitoring the registration exercise in Bwari, Abuja, said the board also plans to register at least 50,000 candidates per day.
Açcording to him, it has succeeded in registering about 70,000 two days ago, adding that the exercise has been mostly successful and 99 percent of the problems encountered by candidates were self-inflicted because they played into the hands of fraudsters.
While appealing to noncandidates to keep off registration centres, he urged parents to allow their children to read the registration instructions and follow, warning candidates not to divulge their codes to third parties as fraudsters could use them to manipulate their profiles to their own detriment.
On those whose SIMs are missing, he said JAMB is doing something about it but cautiously, in order not to open up candidates to manipulation by fraudsters.
“We are working with the telcos in such a way that when that happens, we are putting a system in place, telephone update, where you would use your thumbprint to show that it was the same thumbprint then we would allow the system to change to another sim for you.
“But if at the point of testing your thumbs, the fingerprints are not coming up, we would leave you to go back and get your welcome back. We are doing this but we have to do it with caution because that can open students to unnecessary exposure of their personal data.
“We are not asking them to wait we are saying, we are looking into the possibility of what we can do. He added that JAMB will talk to all agencies involved in the registration process as if you register in your name, it is beyond JAMB, because every candidate has been marked, not only with the registration number but with the phone,” he said.
According to Oloyede, “It is like doing internet banking. The phone number with which you are doing internet banking is very critical to your banking. If you just flippantly change the number and you give instruction from another phone, you know the damage that you would do.
“The phone is a marker and once the phone is misplaced, please go and get it replaced and when you get it replaced there must be a procedure to get you into our system so that you don’t replace somebody wrongly.
He said the board has found three or four vendors wanting and are currently undergoing interactions with the appropriate office, adding that some of the directors are interrogating the vendors and once JAMB is convinced that they have done the wrong thing, it would blacklist the agents and also warn the vendor.
On the new approach of candidates filling and submitting hardcopy forms before commencing registration, he said the new method was introduced because candidates come and waste a lot of money trying to change correct names and when you ask them, they say though I approved of it but I was not the one who type.
He added that after filling the form, candidates must confirm that everything is right and the form would be uploaded in the candidate’s handwriting, which explains why at registration points, JAMB has double screens, one facing the candidate and the other facing the official carrying out the registration.