The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has said a total of 160,617 candidates will be taking part in its mock unified tertiary matriculation examination (UTME) which is slated to hold in June 3.
The examination, which had earlier been scheduled to hold on May 20 before it was postponed, will be conducted at the approved 802 computer-based centres (CBT) located in 104 designated examination towns across the country.
The head of JAMB’s public affairs and protocol unit, Fabian Benjamin, disclosed this on Monday in an exclusive interview with Funloaded.
Mr Benjamin advised all candidates who had registered for the examination and indicated interest to sit the mock examination to reprint their notification slips.
“It is imperative for the mock examination candidates to reprint notification slips because the new slips will have a new date This is as a result of the change of date for the UTME-mock,” he said.
He added that the slip can be reprinted by candidates anywhere they find convenient “as long as they have access to the internet.”
1.3m candidates registered so far
Meanwhile, one week after the announcement of the registration deadline for the examination, JAMB has only recorded an additional roughly 200,000 candidates comprising both the UTME and Direct entry candidates.
According to the examination body, a total of 124,519 candidates, who have indicated interest to register for the examination and had procured profile codes, are yet to obtain the required registration pins.
Mr Fabian enjoined interested prospective candidates not to wait till the last minute to register for the examination, saying the body would no longer consider an adjustment to its calendar.
Meanwhile, as of May 14, the JAMB registrar, Ishaq Oloyede, said only 1,134,424 candidates, comprising both UTME and DE candidates, were registered.
The low enrolment reportedly caused by the difficulties encountered by candidates in their efforts to set up profile codes.
But after a meeting held between May 14 and 15, the stakeholders including the representatives of the telecommunication operators, Nigerian Communications Commission, digital service providers, among others, resolved to extend the registration deadline by two weeks.
They concluded that the problem of transporting the profile codes to the end-users by the telecommunication companies is a result of technical challenges being faced by the concerned organisations. They, however, expressed their commitment to addressing the issues.
NIN versus low registration figure
Meanwhile, sources at JAMB and other stakeholders have linked the low registration figures so far recorded in the ongoing registration exercise to the mandatory use of the national identification number (NIN) issued by the National Identification Management Commission (NIMC).
The adoption of the unique number for the registration purpose has cancelled the possibility of more than one registration per candidate, the stakeholders, who do not want their names mentioned, have said.
They claimed that unlike before when the incidences of ‘machinery’ being registered by candidates were not completely eradicated, the adoption of NIN has served the purpose of comprehensive security checks.
“The target was to meet up with the about 1.9 million candidates registered in 2020, but as we have seen, more than one week after the extension, JAMB has only recorded an additional figure of about 200,000. This implies that hardly could it record up to 1.7 million candidates this year,” one of the sources and owner of a computer-based test centre, who does not want to be quoted, told our reporter on the phone on Monday afternoon.
