The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has released 1,606,901 results out of the 1,718, 425 that registered in the just concluded Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
The JAMB registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, said this at a news conference in Abuja on Wednesday.
Oloyede said the results were released within 24 hours of the examination, adding that the remaining 80,889 candidates results would be released soon.
He said it was also a deliberate act by the board to withhold about 76,923 results due to some alleged malpractices in some of the Computer Based Centres (CBT) where exams were held.
“Six weeks into the registration, we harvested in preparation for the exam about 1.7 million registrations.
“But so far, we have released the results of 1,606,901 candidates leaving us with a balance of 80,889.
“Out of this 80,889, we have deliberately withheld 76,925 results for further investigation because of alleged malpractices.”
The registrar said that results would henceforth not be released immediately from 2018 unless every issues pertaining to the conduct of an examination had been thoroughly looked into which depict the international best practices.
He added that results that had not been released would be released before the commencement of admission exercise.
He also said that supplementary examination would be conducted soon for candidates who had hitches in the registration and examination processes.
Oloyede attributed some of the hitches to some CBT owners and cyber cafe operators.
“Anybody whose biometric could not be verified will be allowed to do the supplementary examination.
“As at today, 640 candidates out of 1.7million candidates did not do biometric verification, reasons being that some fraudsters registered candidates across online.
“In this case, the students are not guilty of the offence and hence will be made to write the exam again under my own very eyes.”
Oloyede highlighted some of the exam malpractices to have been initiated by parents who pay heavily to buy fake questions for their wards.
He said others include deliberate shut down and disconnection of network by some CBT owners to access questions on the computers and also exploit candidates of their fortune.
“In the course of our monitoring, JAMB had to buy question for N20,000 and also cases where CBT centres approaches our staff promising N500,000 for them to give out questions.
“These are some of the challenges we experienced in this exam,” he said.
Oloyede, however, promised to introduce electronic jammers in subsequent examination to further reduce malpractices.
He also called on public and religious institutions to avoid letting out their premises to CBT centres as this create room for fraudulent practices.
He advised candidates having issues or any form of correction to go to designated JAMB CBT centres and do so for free. (NAN)