JAMB registers 1.6m candidates, says UTME
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has registered 1.6 million candidates for the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
The board said the sale of UTME forms would end on Wednesday, 22nd February, 2023 following a one week extension.
Registrar of JAMB, Is-haq Oloyede, disclosed this in Abuja on Monday while monitoring the registration of applicants at the Global Distance Learning, Abuja.
Oloyede was joined in the monitoring exercise by the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education, David Adajo.
JAMB commenced the sale of 2023 UTME form on Saturday, 14th January, 2023, and was expected to close on Tuesday, 14th February, 2023.
However, to ensure every candidate get carried along, the Board extended the registration exercise by one week, starting from Wednesday, 15th February, 2023.
Oloyede said: “So far we have registered 1.6 million (that is one million, six hundred thousand candidates.”
He said the Board has apprehended about 15 people who went against the conduct of the UTME registration processes.
The permanent secretary explained that the extension was necessary to ensure all the candidates have time to register.
He said: “Ordinarily, registration for UTME has closed but to take care of people that could, for one reason or another not be able to make the deadline of February 14th, especially as you know, most of registration processes depends on banks and we could not have top level bank operations from the past three weeks for understandable reasons.
“Here the turn out is very low because the first set of registration that ended on February 14th had virtually captured more than 98 percent of people so the people that are being captured now are those that are left over.
“Today, for instance we only met three people. We asked the head of this center how many were registered on Saturday and he said about 15 so I think the monitoring gave us the confidence that yes it was a good idea to extend so we don’t leave anybody out of the box.”
