THE Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) says it has so far registered a total of 1,681,130 candidates for the 2019 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) which is scheduled to hold in March.

The candidate number increased by 1.1 percent from 1,662,762  applicants in  2018.

The Board in its monthly bulletin released on Monday indicated that the candidates were registered between January 10 and February 15.

According to the statistics, Lagos has the highest number of registered candidates with a total number of 234,259 candidates, followed by Kaduna and Oyo with 99,677 and 80,473 candidates respectively.

Ebonyi, Kebbi and Zamfara states had the least numbers of registered candidates. While Ebonyi and Kebbi states recorded 13,542 and 13,305 respectively, Zamfara had just 6,475 candidates.

A total of 1,662,762 candidates registered for the 2018 UTME, within a period of two months, as against a total of 1,718,425 candidates who registered within one month in 2017. In 2016, a total of 1,561,443 candidates sat for the UTME.

Registration for the 2019 UTME and Direct Entry (DE) registration exercise commenced on Thursday, January 10, and is expected to end on Thursday, February 21.

The Board said it would not extend the registration for the annual matriculation examination.

Recall that The ICIR reported that JAMB had suspended nine Computer-Based Test (CBT) centres that breached the code governing the 2019 UTME registration exercise.