The Joint Matriculation and Admissions Commission, JAMB, has said it will no longer conduct screening examinations for candidates sitting for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, who have failed biometric verification.
The council made this known in its weekly bulletin of the office of the Secretary, yesterday, in Abuja.
It said the move was made to further tighten the noose around examination malpractices, saying: “The board has decided that the era where some candidates will appear at the examination venue and claim difficulties will pass the biometric verification and wait, that the system will allow them to sit for the exam, is gone for good.
“It would be recalled that the board out of magnanimity allowed such candidates to be rescheduled for the UTME screening introduced in 2017. However, the board has recently realized the futility of such an arrangement after evaluating the process and its impact on the entire expertise value chain.
“Therefore, the management of the board has regrettably decided that all candidates must be screened to pass the examination as there will be no more UTME clearing for whatever reason.
“To accommodate the few who may have genuine cases of impossibility to be apprehended, such candidates must clearly indicate such difficulty from the time of registration.
“This is so that they can be referred to a center located at the council’s National Headquarters for close monitoring.”
The bulletin noted that the move was not only to sanitize the examination process, but also to ensure that the board’s hard-earned reputation was not tarnished.
JAMB said the decision came as a result of a thorough review of the 2022 UTME exercise by the management with the need to plug all loopholes noticed during the inspection.
“Examination malpractice remains one of the major obstacles facing all public examination authorities worldwide, so they need to take consistent measures to confront the monster.
“No UTME candidate will be allowed to take the examination without prior biometric verification. All 10 fingers of the candidate must be captured at the registration point.
“To combat the menace of examination malpractice, the board has made full use of technology by introducing, among other things, a biometric scan of the candidate’s 10 fingers during UTME registration.
“This is done in order to conclusively match the fingerprints taken by the candidate and the fingerprints submitted by the candidate in the exam,” the statement said.
The board said any scenario other than the above is an invitation to investigate a security breach.
