More than 80 percent of the 98,232 candidates eligible for Saturday’s nationwide mop-up Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) failed to appear, a development the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board , JAMB attributed to intensified security measures targeting impersonators and exam cheats.
JAMB Registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, who monitored the exercise at the Technology CBT Centre in NAF Valley Estate, Abuja, told journalists that turnout was alarmingly low, with only about 12 percent of registered candidates showing up across the country.
The JAMB Registrar noted that mop-up exams are typically organized for a few thousand candidates with legitimate reasons such as illness or verified technical issues to miss the main UTME.
Oloyede said every year, JAMB conducts mop-up, and it is normally for about 5,000 students or less . Who for illness, for genuine excuse, could not take the exam. Or who, after review, we saw had technical problems in their centers.
He explained that this year’s large mop-up pool was necessitated by allegations of widespread absence in the main examination, saying the Board opted to give everyone a second chance—while also leveraging intelligence gathered from security agencies.
(Editor: Nkoli Omhoudu)
