UTME candidates: second chance for genuine ones

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) says it is  finalising modalities for the for the re-take of the recently concluded Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME)  by candidates with genuine cases.

Dr Fabian Benjamin, the board’s head of  media and information did not say when the examination will take place.

There were complaints by some UTME candidates over glitches experienced during the examination.

Benjamin however debunked speculations  that the board had  cancelled the entire results of the 2016 examination.

He said JAMB will review criteria for selecting centres for its Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

Benjamin acknowledged that there were technical hitches in about 20 of the 520 centres registered to host the 2016 UTME on the Computer Based Test (CBT) platform nationwide.

“I want to say that we are making efforts to come up with new selection method and approval of the centres we shall be using for the conduct of our examination henceforth.

“We shall be considering using more of public owned centres and a few organised privately owned centres.

“From statistics available to us, we have discovered that most of the issues we had with centres during the examination were associated with those with private concerns,’’ he said.

While expressing the board’s regret over the technical problem, Benjamin, however, said he was happy that the conduct of the examination was generally successful.

He noted that over 1.6 million candidates sat for the examination within and outside the country.