UTME: We won’t reduce registration fee - JAMB

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, has said contrary to agitations in some quarters that its registration fee for Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, be reduced,it has no such intention.


JAMB Registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, addressing the media, Tuesday, in Abuja, following increasing concerns raised by stakeholders in education sector about the fee for the registration, insisted that JAMB registration fee would still be pegged at the current amount.

Oloyode, who spoke after a computer-based promotion examination held for JAMB’s staff, said the fee being charged by the board was one of the lowest in the entire world.

“Why are they not asking WAEC (to reduce fee)? Why are they not asking NECO? Why are they not asking NABTEB? Why JAMB? We charge the least and you are saying reduce.

“The issue is because we have a means of managing the resources properly and we now have what you can call surplus and because we are open enough to return the surplus to government you now say we should crash the cost.

“What should be the basis of crashing the cost assuming the method we are using now is no longer available and we have to use the old method,” he said.

He, however, said the examination body would only follow directive from the appropriate quarters on the cost of UTME.

“If the government feels we should adjust, we will adjust and not as a result of unqualified, baseless request (in some quarters),” Oloyede said.

On the staff promotion exam, the JAMB boss said the exercise was to further assured of the Board’s readiness to always conduct seamless examination, adding that the new software used in the exam which cost N6 million will now be deployed for third-party clients exams to avoid issues that trailed the one conducted for Police Service Commission (PSC).

“One of the last one we did is the PSC and we saw that because we are trying to save money some mischievous people wanted to embarrass us.

“Because the software we were using before has some inbuilt mechanism that it must carry 180 questions that if not complete it will not move; so you can tell people write exam from question 1 to 120 but don’t do anything below, in such an instance some mischievous people decided to see what is below and started saying they were setting Arabic and so on, we saw that was capable of generating unnecessary ill-feelings,” Oloyede said.

On the 2018 admission, the JAMB boss said 24,148 candidates have gained admission as at Wednesday August 29, adding that the exercise is a continuous process

JAMB had sold its 2018 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, application form for N5, 000 while it remitted N7.8billion to the Federal Government at the end of the exam.