Following Widespread Technical Issues

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has officially kicked off the rescheduling of UTME for a whopping 379,997 candidates whose exams were messed up by technical issues. The do-over begins a day after the board’s Registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, admitted things didn’t quite go as planned.

At a press briefing in Abuja, Prof. Oloyede came clean, saying there were indeed technical hitches during the just-concluded UTME. The numbers are no joke, over 206,000 candidates in 65 centres across Lagos had issues, and another 173,387 candidates in 92 centres in the South-East also got caught in the tech web.

Now, if you’re wondering what went wrong, JAMB says the UTME isn’t internet-based. It runs on a local area network (LAN), so it wasn’t about bad network reception. The problems had more to do with registration data mix-ups and CBT centre mishandling.

In the wake of the chaos, JAMB has penalized 132 CBT centres for mishandling registration data, and now urges all affected candidates to reprint their slips to find out when and where their second shot at UTME will take place.