Some Private Secondary Schools Extort UTME Candidates – JAMB Registrar

The Registrar, Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Professor Ishaq Oloyede, has lamented that some private secondary schools are in the habit of extorting candidates of the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

He said the schools inflate the costs of the JAMB forms, whereas there are others that mismanage the personal details of the candidates.

Oloyede revealed this while appearing as a guest on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily programme on Monday.

“What we are calling on the candidates to do is that they should go to the centre and register. But one very important thing that we are facing now with students either with disabilities or without disability is that UTME is not a school-based examination,” Oloyede said.

“There are private secondary schools who are extorting the candidates, they will take 10,000, 20,000 and they say JAMB form whereas they pay just 6,000 or 7,000 as the case may be. They are mismanaging the data of the candidates.

“Every candidate is supposed to register with his or her own phone but these people are mixing their data together.

“Even one institution, Federal Government College, Bwari, wrote to us, ‘Can you give them (people with disabilities) special registration?’ It is not possible, we are not school-based. We register individual candidates who are going into the university, we are not registering cohorts.”

In 2023, the Board announced the creation of 11 UTME centers specially for Persons With Disabilities (PWD).

According to the JAMB helmsman, the main reason behind creation of centres for PWDs was to offer equal opportunity for all candidates writing the UTME.

“The idea is that those who are suffering from physical disabilities require support. We find out that they need special attention and this special attention cannot be easily available in 774 centres across the country.

“So, what we therefore did was to create centres that are as close as possible to where they are coming from. We know that that is even a strain on them but in order to provide equal opportunity for them, what we have also done is to provide wherewithal for them and their guide to the centre and we created this centres across the country so that the closer they are to the place of abode of these candidates the better,” Oloyede said.

Oloyede made this revelation, barely three weeks after the Federal Government closed down 18 foreign universities in Nigeria, warning Nigerians to avoid enrolling in them.

The government labelled the affected institutions as “degree mills,’’ noting that it had not licensed them to operate in the country.