The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has described its supplementary Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examintion (UTME) held across 170 centres nationwide Saturday as satisfactory.
The board’s Head of Media and Information, Dr. Fabian Benjamin, made the remark in an interview with the News agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos on Saturday.
The board’s Registrar, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, had after the conduct of the main examination that held between May 10 and May 20 announced the cancellation of 59,698 results of the 1.7 million candidates.
He hinged the cancellation on what he had described as ‘organised malpractice.’
Oloyede also announced the blacklisting of 48 Computer Based Test Centres (CBTs) over their involvement in extortion and organised examination malpractice during the same examination.
He, however, noted that the board had fixed July 1 for supplementary examination for candidates who had registered late for this year’s UTME.
Oloyede added that some of the candidates, whose results were cancelled, would also take part in the rescheduled examination, having discovered that they were not directly involved in such malpractice.
He also listed other categories of candidates with issues such as biometric non-verification machine related issues, technical and logout issues, incomplete results and candidates who lost examination sessions due to malfunctioning of servers at the affected centre as those to participate in the supplementary UTME.
Oloyede had noted that the decision to allow the candidates sit for the rescheduled examination was reached after a thorough review of all the reports that emanated from their centres.
According to Benjamin, however, no fewer than 85,000 candidates participated in the supplementary examination.
“I must say we are happy with the conduct of the rescheduled examination. In fact the conduct of the examination in all the centres was satisfactory.
“We did not anticipate any challenges and I must say it was well monitored going by the fact that the number of candidates that participated was just a fraction of the number that had sat for the examination earlier in May.
“Having said this, however, we do not envisage coming across issues that led to the cancelation of results of some candidates after the main examination.
“But in an event where we come across any, we will not hesitate to cancel such results again.
“We have just concluded the examination and we are hopeful that within the next 24 hours, candidates will start receiving their results,’’ he said.
NAN reports that no fewer than five centres were used in the conduct of the examination in Lagos.
