The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board has partnered security operatives and agencies to curb cyber crimes and eliminate modern cheating methods used by fraudulent candidates sitting for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination. The board reiterated that the 2019 UTME slated for between April 11 and 18 would be sat for by 1,886,008 registered candidates. The JAMB Registrar, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, announced the partnership at a stakeholders’ meeting in Abuja on Monday where he said the board also moved some key services to its registration portal to prevent commercial banks and cyber cafes from extorting money from candidates.

Oloyede said the board was tackling several problems, created by fraudulent Computer-Based Test centres such as impersonation, attempts on cloning of registration of sim cards, illegal extension of registration points and so on.He said, “Our challenges are many; first is impersonation. Also, there is the illegitimate movement of routers to unregistered locations; the illegal extension of registration points from the CBT centre network to other locations, the extortion of candidates by some centres, attempts on cloning of registration SIM cards through the use of technology and operation of syndicates of both CBT centres and cyber cafes.“

Others are candidates patronising cyber cafes for materials relating to JAMB registration or examination at centres such as compact disc, examination pack, examination questions and answers, erosion of values and fraudulent private tutorial classes. “What is our way forward? We are partnering security operatives and relevant agencies on cyber crimes. We are engaging technocrats and tapping from their knowledge. We are also moving some key services to the registration portal in order to prevent extortion of candidates. ”

Oloyede insisted that candidates’ fingerprints must be captured during the biometric verification before they could be allowed to sit for the UTME, adding that candidates whose fingerprints could not be captured across the country would have to go to the JAMB headquarters and register. “ They will come to the JAMB head office in Abuja to sit for their examination and not any other centre. Any candidate that cannot be verified in the biometrics data base must not be allowed to take the examination under any guise,” he said.

Meanwhile, the  faculty of Medicine, Pharmacy and Health Sciences across universities had the most number of candidates registered for courses in the just concluded 2019 UTME registration. According to the board’s Head of Media and Information, Dr Fabian Benjamin, a total of 435,897 candidates applied for various courses under the faculty, with more applications coming from female candidates. No fewer than 275,323 female candidates registered as against 160,574 male candidates who are set to sit for the examination.

He added that the faculties of Agriculture across universities had the lowest number of registered candidates, 32,729 in all, with only 14,586 females and 18,143 males picking interest in Agricultural courses.He said faculties of Agriculture across polytechnics also had a low number of candidates registered for the 2019 UTME. Only 2,303 candidates; 949 females and 1,354 males may write the examination to study courses under the faculty.Faculties of Social Science across polytechnics, however, had the highest number of registered candidates for the examination with 8,946 females and 10,337 males making the total population of 19,283 registered candidates.