JAMB reveals number of approved CBT centres

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board,
JAMB, says tomorrow’s Unified Tertiary
Matriculation Examination, UTME, would hold in
605 Computer Base Test, CBT, centres which
have already been approved across the country.
The JAMB registrar, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, who
spoke in Abuja yesterday, stated that the board
would pay N600 per candidate to write the
examination at any approved CBT centre, adding
that the payment was to discourage candidates
from paying any amount to examination centres.
He said, “At the end of the two months application
window, we realised that 1,662,763 candidates
registered for the 2018 exam. This was contrary
to 1,718,425 candidates that registered for same
exam within a month and two weeks period in
2017.
“A total of three hundred and sixty-seven virtually
impaired candidates registered for this year’s
examination as against the 201 last year.
“The board will continue to provide all necessary
support and logistics to the physically-challenged
candidates for them to attain their educational
pursuit. The Equal Opportunity Group under Prof.
Okebukola, who assisted last year, will be
conducting the examination for the virtually
impaired candidates.”
“We will not release the results immediately this
year because last year, we wanted to prove a
point that there was nothing extraordinary in
immediate release but we know that that is not
global best practices. Because we had to cancel
some results as a result of what we found out
later,” Oloyede said.
DAILY POST recalls that operators of Computer-
Based Test, CBT, centres yesterday pleaded with
JAMB to give them a reasonable timeline to factor
in its technical capacity in readiness for the UTME
slated to begin this Friday.
Speaking under the aegis of The CBT Centre
Proprietors Association of Nigeria, they expressed
concern about the marching order given by JAMB
to the CBT centre owners to download the board’s
software on Sunday.
Chairman of the association, Alexander
Ogedengbe, speaking to journalists at the end of
its one-day seminar on JAMB UTME 2018 ethics,
metrics and technicalities, said, “we will want
them to be aware that the time they mandated us
to go and download the browser to use for the
examination was very short”.