The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has stated that it would soon begin to clear the backlog of illegal admissions conducted by tertiary education institutions in the country.
This was contained in a statement issued on Sunday, December 5, by the JAMB Registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede after receiving the Education Correspondents Association of Nigeria (ECAN’s) Award of Excellence.
JAMB had recently uncovered 706,189 illegal admissions by universities, polytechnics, colleges of education and other related institutions.
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According to Oloyede, the move is to rescue students who have the requisite qualifications but were admitted illegally.
“On the issue of illegal admission that we want to put a halt to, we want to clear the backlog and ensure that those of them who have been improperly admitted but have the minimum qualification is rescued.
“We want to continue the campaign to discourage those who are committing such illegal action to stop doing such,” Oloyede added.
The JAMB boss expressed deep appreciation to ECAN for considering him worthy of the award.
He said: “We appreciate the gesture and I want to assure you that you have not done this in vain. The objective of presenting this award will be attained. The purpose is to be able to encourage us to do more of what has been assigned to us by the Federal Government. I assure you, we will deliver on the mandate.”
On the 2022 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), Oloyede said the Board has decided to adopt a cashless system in the registration process, adding that JAMB would also prohibit Computer Based Test (CBT) centres from selling e-PINs to guard against extortion of candidates.
“On our campaign on cashless CBT centres particularly during our registration exercise. It is known that many CBT centres, despite the supervision, still manage to exploit candidates.
“We want to put a stop to that, we have intensified monitoring; but part of what we are doing is to ensure we protect the students against this extortion; and that is why we are asking all those (the candidates pay through us); and we will pay the centres (their service charge). With this, anybody who collects money from the centre would have been seen to have done a wrong thing; because you are not supposed to collect any money you…
“We are also going to ensure that ePIN is not something that they will be selling at the (CBT) centres. We will ensure that anybody who wants to sell ePIN will not be a CBT centre; once you are a CBT centre you have lost the right to sell ePIN; so that we can hold the ePIN sellers responsible for what they do.
Once you are a CBT centre you cannot also say you want to sell ePIN.”
