UTME: 2 Days To Deadline, JAMB Registers 1.6m Candidates

Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has registered 1.6 million candidates to sit for the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) as sale of UTME forms ends on Wednesday, 22nd February, 2023.

The registrar of JAMB, Ishaq Oloyede, disclosed this in Abuja yesterday, during a monitoring tour of the registration at Global Distance Learning, Abuja, led by the permanent secretary, Federal Ministry of Education, Andrew David Adajo.

JAMB commenced the sale of 2023 UTME form on Saturday, 14th January, 2023, and was expected to close on Tuesday, 14th February, 2023.

However, to ensure that every candidate gets carried along, the board extended the registration exercise by one week, starting from Wednesday, February 15, 2023.

Oloyede said, “So far we have registered 1.6 million (that is one million, six hundred thousand candidates.” He also disclosed that JAMB has apprehended about 15 people who go against conduct of the UTME registration processes.

Earlier, Adejo explained that the extension was necessary to ensure that all the candidates have time to register.

“Ordinarily, registration for UTME has closed but to take care of people that could, for one reason or another not be able to make the deadline of February 14th, especially as you know, most of the registration processes depends on banks and we could not have top level bank operations for the past three weeks for understandable reasons.

“Here the turnout is very low because the first set of registration that ended on February 14th had virtually captured more than 98 percent of people so the people that are being captured now are those that are left over.

“Today, for instance we only met three people. We asked the head of this centre how many were registered on Saturday and he said about 15 so I think the monitoring gave us the confidence that yes it was a good idea to extend so that we don’t leave anybody out of the box,” he added.