JAMB withholds 80,889 UTME candidates’ results

Citing various sharp prac­tices, the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB) has withheld the results of 80,889 candidates in the just-con­cluded Unified Tertiary Matricula­tion Examination (UTME).

JAMB Registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, who disclosed this on Wednesday in Abuja, said that 76,923 of the affected candidates are being investigated for mal­practices.
He said: “So far, we have re­leased results, within 24 hours of the examination, of 1,606,901 can­didates, leaving us with a balance of 80,889.
“Of this 80,889, we have de­liberately withheld 76,923 for fur­ther investigations because of al­leged malpractices in the centres where the exams were held.
“We do not mean that all the 80,889 candidates committed in­fractions. Those that committed infractions may be less than 10 percent, but when malpractices happened at centres, the candi­dates’ results have to be investi­gated,” he said.
While saying that results of 640 candidates of the withheld results could not be released due to the candidates’ biometric ver­ification problem, Oloyede said JAMB would soon announce a date for supplementary examina­tion for the affected candidates as well as the 3,811 candidates that registered late for the 2017 UTME.
The JAMB boss bemoaned the high level of fraud and so­phisticated malpractices perpe­trated by some Computer-Based Test (CBT) owners during the ex­amination.
“The level of malpractices in the examination was high and it is like some CBT centres are setup to perpetrate malpractices,” Oloyede said, adding that the Board was able to frustrate all the antics of the CBT owners and operators.
He listed some of the antics to include the installation of wire­less devices on roof tops to access JAMB questions, the setting up of ‘VIP’ rooms in which candidates coughed out N200,000 for an­swers to exam questions, deliber­ate disconnection of local network, among others.
Oloyode, however, said that the Board had pencilled down several CBT centres for blacklist­ing, adding that some of the oper­ators had been arrested.
Over 1.7 million candidates regis­tered for this year’s UTME.