By Babalola Seyi
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has invalidated the registrations of 817 individuals who enrolled to take the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations and Direct Entry examinations.
The examining committee stated that the decision was taken due to the detection of several violations, such as the use of unusual fingerprints during the registration procedure.
Professor Ishaq Oloyede, the examination body’s registrar, revealed in a statement made available to our reporter on Wednesday morning that certain registration officials at the affected 178 Computer-Based Test centers inserted their fingerprints to complete the registration process for the applicants.
The former Vice-chancellor of the University of Ilorin, however, mentioned that the 817 affected students would be given another opportunity to re-register for the exam with the centres bearing the cost.
He said: “For the students who allowed other people to add their fingers to their registration procedure, we found that some of them were only naive, because you will 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 those who are genuine from those who are not genuine. We will cancel all of them, all the registrations, and we will ask them to re-register.
“The centres involved, we have just met with them, and they all confessed, nobody is disputing it, even students that were telling lies, they know we have the technology that won’t allow any lie to be accommodated.
“On their own (the CBT centres 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.”
Allowing a registration officer or any other person to add his or her finger during the capture of a candidate’s biometric data might result in impersonation in the exam, as well as giving such “weird” people access to modify critical facts such as exam center, according to the JAMB boss.
“By adding his or her finger to your registration, it means he or her 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.”
