The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board on Thursday vowed not to release results of candidates identified in footages of Close Circuit Television (CCTV) to have indulged in unwholesome practices during the just-concluded Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
JAMB registrar, Ishaq Oloyede, who spoke as guest on a Channels Television current affairs programme, Sunrise Daily, said his agency had been busy in the past days reviewing recorded footages of the examination across the country, and that a number of candidates had been marked out for sanction.
Mr. Oloyede, a professor of Islamic Studies, was responding to a question by one of the anchors of the programme on why some candidates were yet to receive their results despite promises by JAMB to release outcomes within 24 hours.
The registrar said, “Those who have not received (their results) are qualified not to receive for now. In all cases where there were no problems, we released results of the examination within 24 hours.
“But those who have not (received their results), they may not be culpable but we are investigating. Where we have reason to doubt anything or where we have report of anything that is not acceptable to us, we have withheld the results.
“And we will keep on releasing them as we clear them. For instance, this morning, we released another 15,000 results. But among those who sat in that centre, we have reasons, concrete evidence to say about 300 of them, their results will not be released because we know they were not in the hall where the examination took place.
“We are comparing those who sat for the examination, how long they sat in the hall, and how some of them took excuses that they were going to the toilet only to go to what they called VIP…
“All this we are now able to track. And we want to say that we will not hesitate to sanction anybody no matter how highly placed.”
Mr. Oloyede said the CCTV cameras deployed at every Computer Based Test (CBT) centres across the country helped JAMB to detect and arrest unwholesome practices.
He said some centre operators however tried to sabotage his agency’s plan to make the examination fraud-free, citing the example of a centre in Kubwa, Abuja, where operators blinded the cameras with sacks to frustrate remote detection of malpractices that happened there.
The JAMB registrar appealed to credible organisations and individuals to come forward to partner JAMB in the establishment of reputable CBT centres across the country.
“Crooks are now establishing CBT centres, and meeting our requirements only to misuse the opportunities,” he said.
JAMB had on May 16 released the first batch results of the UTME conducted between May 13 and May 20. The Board continued to release the results in batches ever since.
About 1.7 million candidates registered for the 2017 UTME and sat for the examination in 642 centres across the country.
About 1.2 million candidates registered for the examination in 2016.
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