Applicants for the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) will not be sent to test centers other than their designated ones, according to the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB).
This was stated in a statement made on Saturday in Abuja by Fabian Benjamin, the board’s spokesman. Benjamin stated that JAMB understood the significance of applicants’ comfort and made sure that they could choose from a variety of CBT centers to sit for their exams.
His explanation is that JAMB assigns test centers within the towns that candidates choose, but that candidates ultimately have the freedom to choose their testing town.
“We firmly believe that some parents are being tricked, misled, and cheated again and time again by their children and by certain owners of secondary schools who spread this deception.
Candidates have the right to choose their preferred examination town when they register, so let that be crystal clear. After that, a JAMB center in that town will be assigned to them.
“It is completely false, intentionally misleading, and designed to discredit the Board’s credibility that candidates are assigned to places that do not match their preferences. That never occurs.
In response to this “false yet popular narrative,” he announced that the board would be rewarding anyone with “huge financial rewards” for proving that even a single candidate had been posted outside of their preferred town.
The representative for JAMB emphasized that in order to maintain transparency and refrain from taking matters into one’s own hands, the requested evidence must be submitted to the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) via WhatsApp at 08056003030 within the next 96 hours.
He went on to say that this procedure will make sure that an impartial entity can verify the evidence, hand up the award if it’s right, or finally clear the Board of the ongoing campaign of slander.
Candidates should be encouraged to appear at CBT centers 90 minutes prior to the start of examinations for preliminary verification.
Anyone who sees no problem with airlines demanding that passengers be at the airport two hours before departure should similarly find no problem with this recommendation.
According to him, a lot of parents don’t understand the prerequisite procedures if they think their children won’t need more than two hours to complete a two-hour test.
Benjamin appealed to the public to afford agencies the benefit of the doubt and to trust that they exist to serve the public interest in the best possible manner. He stressed that JAMB will always prioritize the common good.
One further example of naiveté: a female UTME candidate who flat-out refused to answer any questions on her test this morning.
“She was following her grandfather’s instruction to do nothing and wait for miraculous intervention,” he explained. Candidates, he said, should not have foolish and superstitious hopes of getting what they don’t deserve.