Education in Nigeria
2025 UTME: JAMB exposes candidates who paid to cheat, vows to censor culprits
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has disclosed that 180 candidates paid N30,000 each through its decoy website; in order to engage in examination malpractice in the forthcoming Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
Addressing reporters Thursday at a CBT centre located within JAMB headquarters, during the monitoring of Mock UTME exam, the Registrar, Professor Is-haq Olanrewaju Oloyede, stated that the culprits will be censored through seizure of their UTME and Direct Entry (DE) for exhibiting cheating tendencies.
He said over 211,000 candidates sat for the Mock UTME across designated Computer-Based Test (CBT) centres in the country, giving assurances that the result will be released tomorrow, being Friday, April 11.
He revealed that the mock exam will be used to correct any identified problem in the system ahead of the UTME scheduled for April 25.
He said: “The word is mock and we want to say so far, so good. What we want to do is to try some things. As students are getting wiser, we are also getting better because we are doing certain things to ensure that those things are done.
“So we are trying to make sure that when we go for the exam, we would have taken experience and taken some lessons from our experience at the Mock level. We urge candidates that are being used for the experiment to please bear with us.
“We need to let the students know that the best way to pass the examination, UTME in particular, is to study. We are aware of some rogue websites asking people to come and pay that they can help. It cannot work. We have also opened our own rogue website and as of this morning, about 180 students have paid.
“So those who paid into that account, looking for questions, we are going to deal firmly with them and many of the institutions, because to attempt to cheat is already an infraction. UTME is not a school-based examination.
“We register students individually and that is why we tell the students, do not give (out) your registration number. Do not register by proxy. Do not give your registration number to anybody. Some of these schools want to be able to brag that 10 students from their school scored 280.
“There was a state where even the governor of the state was misinformed and they were celebrating nothing. So, this type of thing that people want to cut corners, we are abreast of all this and we are doing everything possible to stop it.
“We have about 180 of them. And we are going to deal with them firmly. We are going to cancel their results, both UTME and DE.
“Some of them are paying N30,000 for something that will never work. When I look at those who have paid to us this money, I smile.
“They will have the results tomorrow. Those who finished, we are working now on their results, but we want to compare with the second batch, the third batch, and so on and see that everything is working well. But later by tomorrow, they will have the results.”