By Yekeen Nurudeen
The Registrar, Joint Admission and Matriculation Board, JAMB Ishaq Oloyede on Monday recounted his experience in the hands of some syndicate groups who sell past question papers of the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination UTME as “expo” for as much as N200,000 to unsuspecting candidates.
He alleged that some of the fraudulent persons simply take past questions papers and redesign them by changing the date to conform to the current year, then sell same to gullible candidates who may not have prepared well for the examination.
According to Oloyede, some candidates actually fell for the trick, paying huge sums of money to purchase the question papers, only to be disappointed on the examination day.
The Registrar narrated his experience when he monitored the on-going UTME in some centres in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja alongside Minister of State for Education, Anthony Anwuka.
He revealed that a staff of JAMB came under physical attack from a candidate in one of the centres in Abia State, possibly because he was disappointed that he saw different questions at the examination centre he enrolled.
He said the situation had been taken care of as the candidate has been arrested.
According to the JAMB Registrar, there was no room for malpractices in this year’s UTME as all loopholes where fraud emanates from have been effectively blocked.
“Everything is going on well, we are monitoring what is going on except for a person that was said to have attacked one of our staff in Abia early this morning.
“The security agents have taken care of the situation, he was promptly arrested. He claimed to be a candidate, maybe he was duped somewhere by somebody. Some of these people go about telling people they can give them questions.
“This morning some body sent me questions. They call it Oriji and he bought it for N200,000 and when I saw it, it was our questions in 1984 and he just put 2017 on it and started selling it and people are buying it.
“So if people are corrupt, I won’t have any sympathy, if they are duped by corrupt people like themselves. They are just being wise; they went into the past questions of JAMB and just changed the heading.
“Somebody else called me and said he had all my questions I asked him to send them to me and when I checked I just laughed because none of that was in our questions. What people are just doing they are making money because people are gullible.
“We appeal to people to do things according to the rules. No cutting of corners will work with JAMB and that is why many of the candidates who fell for such blackmail are disappointed, “he told journalists who accompanied him on the monitoring exercise.
Out of the 1.7million candidates who applied for the examination in 2017, about 57,000 sat for the UTME on Saturday, while another 440,000 candidates took theirs on Monday.
Some have received their results while others still await theirs.
He said, “For Monday May 15, we are having 440,000 candidates taking the examination. We have finished in some states and some states will continue on Thursday but by Friday we should be over then we face the foreign students.
“We have rounded up in some parts of Abia, some parts of Bauchi, some parts of Niger but we will go on in Kebbi, we will go on in Lagos until tomorrow.
“Oyo will go for four days. Where we have sufficient number of CBT centres like in Delta, they are complaining that they are not fully utilised but we are going to engage them to make sure they are fully utilised all the year round”.