By Yekeen Nurudeen
The Registrar, Joint Admission and Matriculation Board, JAMB, Is-haq Oloyede has said that the Board is currently considering a reduction in the time allowed for candidates that will sit for the 2017 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination.
Oloyede said experience worldwide has shown that candidates cannot be kept in an examination such as UTME for more than two hours.
“We may reduce the duration of the examination for this year UTME. You cannot keep children of this age for three hours. For their age, the maximum time you can keep them is two hours. So we are considering the reduction in the time they spend because once it is more than two hours you can’t expect that they will retain their presence of mind, ” the JAMB Registrar explained.
Candidates writing the annual UTME are expected to answer questions in four subjects, including English language, which is mandatory, and are expected to spend three hours.
Oloyede disclosed this on Wednesday in Kaduna at the Strategic Planning and Supervision and Evaluation of the Conduct of UTME, where he also hinted that a total of 240,000 candidates have so far registered for the examination coming up on May 20, 2017.
The sales of UTME admission forms commenced on March 20 and it is expected to end on April 22.
The JAMB registrar said the Board is currently working to address the teething challenges that have attended the registration process noting that the process is being normalised .
“We have taken steps to address the teething challenges that have attended the registration process. We hope that the process would normalise soon”, he said .
Oloyede revealed further that out of 13 commercial banks and the Nigeria Postal Service, NIPOST that signified interest in the sales of the admission forms, only nine have paid for the number of application documents they required in the first instance, noting that Zenith Bank had procured N2.5billion worth of forms while Jaiz Bank procured N256 million worth of forms.
Speaking on the capacity of Computer Based Centers, CBT, he said each center had been allocated 250 candidates each in order to avoid pitfalls that characterised the previous examinations.
“Two hundred and fifty candidates would be distributed to all centers without any discrimination. No center would be favoured and no center would be discriminated against,” he said.
While reacting to calls for the extension of the validity of UTME results, the he expressed hope that the federal government would not concede to such calls as any attempt to extend the validity of the result according to him would expose Nigeria to ridicule in the comity of nations.
His words: ” UTME is a placement examination and not an aptitude test, the validity of the result cannot be extended.
“I hope that the President and Senate would not allow the extension of the validity of JAMB results. It can be very embarrassing to the country in the comity of nations”.
He also reiterated that awaiting result candidates have not been excluded from applying to write the matriculation examination, but emphasized that such persons must upload their results on JAMB’s portal before it commences admission.