About 1.4 million candidates have so far taken part in the ongoing Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) across the country since it kicked off on Friday, May 6, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has said.

JAMB, in its weekly bulletin published on Monday, said a total of 526,119 candidates took part on Friday; 506,868 on Saturday; and 391,849 on Monday.

It added that 262,885 candidates have been scheduled to take their tests on Tuesday; 72,433 on Wednesday and 793 on Thursday.

Visually-challenged candidates are expected to sit the examination between Thursday and Saturday, May 14 when the conduct of this year’s edition of the examination is expected to end.

The conduct of UTME for visually-changed candidates is usually conducted by JAMB’s equal opportunity group which is led by a former executive secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), Peter Okebukola.

The committee in 2021 conducted the examination in about 11 centres nationwide representing specific states and regions, with the examination body picking up the transportation, accommodation and feeding bills of the candidates and those who accompany them.

Complaints unaddressed
Meanwhile, despite pockets of complaints by both candidates and their parents, JAMB has kept mum.

Apart from candidates who claimed they missed their examinations due to poor biometric capturing machines, others reported technical hitches such as incomplete questions, power failure and abrupt shutdown of computer systems in the middle of examinations.

But rather than addressing those concerns, JAMB said reports from various centres “have indicated that there have been no significant concerns as the reports coming in from the states established the veracity of the reports earlier received from the various centre accreditation teams.”

The examination body said it will soon begin the release of results of candidates who have already taken the tests.

“However, the release of these results is with a caveat that after previewing the CCTV footage of the conduct of the examination, the result of any candidate found wanting would be withdrawn if it had been released or withheld if not yet released,” it said.

Number of candidates per state
JAMB said a total of 1,730,947 are taking the tests across the country, with a large chunk of the candidates in Lagos, Oyo, Kaduna and Kano states.

According to the examination body, Lagos has the highest number of candidates with 257,887; followed by Oyo with 98,834 and Ogun with 95,965 candidates.

Others are Kaduna with 94,113; Kano with 77,830; FCT with 77,705 and Rivers with 76,388.

States with the lowest enrollment figures are Zamfara with 6,668; Yobe (12,362), Ebonyi (12,600), Kebbi (16,619) and Jigawa with 19,195.

The figures are the number of candidates taking the exams in these states irrespective of the candidate’s states of origin.

Premium Times