The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has ruled out the possibility of extending the period slated for registration of the 2017 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
This was disclosed by the Registrar of the examination body, Professor Ishaq Oloyode, during monitoring exercise to some of the Computer Based Centres accredited by JAMB for the conduct of the examination.
Oloyode while fielding questions from newsmen said about 40 per cent had so far registered for the examination since its commencement two weeks ago, while assuring that the expected number of candidates would be registered within the remaining period.
He said, “I do not envisage any extension. As at now we have registered 40 percent of the expected candidates as at Monday morning and it is just two weeks into the registration exercise. We started two weeks ago, we still have two weeks to go.
“Our planning is to have 50, 000 persons registered per day, when we started in the first week because of lack of familiarity with the technology we are using. As at Sunday, we registered more than 50,000; on Friday we register 80,000 which mean we are ready to cover the backlog. We are 40 percent already, all we need is to go round to open more avenues for students to register.”
The JAMB boss said there are 650 registration centres across the country, advising the candidates to patronize accredited centres, insisting that the examination body would not reverse to its old way of registration.
During his visit to the CBT centre at National Open University (NOUN), Oloyode, identified underutilization of the facilities expected for the registration exercise when such centres have the capacity to register more.
“Prior to this registration exercise, JAMB used to license a CBT centre for registration
one or two computers at the cost of N10, 000 each. What we did this year was to cancel the fee and to give access of 100 to every centre, which means every CBT centre has the capacity to register simultaneously 100 persons. Assuming the centre does not have the human capacity to do so, I expect 20 /30 per cent.
“We have seen particularly in public institutions that the centres are using one, two computers when they have ability to use 100. There are cases where people are using 90 out of 100 computers this is what we expect, but here at the Open University you can see that they are using 6 out of 100 computers expected to use for the registration exercise,” he added.
He explained further that JAMB had approached prominent telecommunications companies to make their facilities available for the smooth conduct of the registration and examination proper.