The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has voided the registrations of 817 candidates for the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, the Registrar of JAMB, told stakeholders about this after separate meetings. He said the registrations were invalidated because of violations involving using strange biometric fingerprints during the registration process.

Oloyede said that some registration officers in the 178 affected Computer Based Test (CBT) centres added one of their fingerprints to complete the registration process for the candidates. He also said that the 817 students would be given another chance to re-register for the exam and that the centres would pay for it.

He said, “For the students who allowed others to add their fingers to their registration procedure. We found that some of them were only naive because you would hear them saying my finger was hot, and the man added his own. And you allowed him to add his own? 

“Some of them did it deliberately for impersonation, but we can’t identify genuine people from those who are not. We will cancel all the registrations and ask them to re-register.

“We have just met with the centres involved, and they all confessed. Nobody is disputing it, even students telling lies; they know we have the technology that won’t allow any lie to be accommodated.

“On their own (CBT owners), they suggested the solution. We will cancel the registrations of those people concerned and we will send a message to them to go back to the very centres where they were registered and the CBT centres will pay to the board the cost of registration of the candidates.”

The head of JAMB said that letting a registration officer or anyone else add their finger while capturing a candidate’s biometric data can lead to impersonation in the exam and give these “strange” people the ability to change important information, like the exam centre.

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“By adding their finger to your registration, they can change all your particulars when you are not there. You know your finger is what is used to identify you. The person can change your examination centre, like, say, from Lagos to Ibadan, and on the exam day, you won’t be able to write the exam.

“That is why we put in place a device that will throw up any strange finger that is not yours and that is why we were able to identify them,” he said.

The head of JAMB said that four of the five CBT centres recently shut down for selling UTME registration pins for more than the set price has been let off the hook.

He did say, though, that the affected CBT centres would send the extra money to the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) so that the proper steps could be taken.

“Those who sold our pins to candidates beyond the approved limit, we have decided to lift the ban on four of the five after they have explained, and they have given us an apology, and they have explained what happened.

“As for those who overcharged, all the candidates who overpaid, we are compiling the list. Those vendors and those institutions will pay the overpayment to the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission.

“They will pay the money to them and the law will determine what to do because I don’t believe the money should go back to the candidates, because if you can pay N3,000, N5,000, N6,000 above the cost, you do not deserve any sympathy. I believe the money should not go back to them because we told them not to pay but now that they have paid, we will recover the money and pay it to the appropriate government agency because if we retain it, they will say JAMB is looking for money, we are not looking for dirty money, we will therefore return the money to the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, so as decides by the law, they can even take it to a charity home and give it to those in need,” Oloyede stated.