By Rosemary Ogbonnaya
Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, has said it would, as from the 2022 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, exercise, be collecting the approved N700 registration fee on behalf of the various Computer-Based Test (CBT) centres along with its UTME registration fees and then remit whatever is due to each registration centre to its bank account on a weekly basis or any timeframe acceptable to the centre owners.
This was contained in the JAMB’s weekly bulletin published on November 29.
It said the laudable step was borne out of a painstaking review of the entire UTME registration process which has revealed some unethical and unacceptable practices by many Computer-Based Testing (CBT) centres.
The board said that the centres are allowed to collect only seven hundred naira (N700) as registration charges but some fraudulent centre owners misused that opportunity to engage in conduct unbecoming of respectable establishments as they indulge in massive extortion of candidates, among others, during the exercise.
Consequently, the Board has resolved to henceforth make the UTME registration process cashless to put a stop to such acts of extortion.
“This intervention will block all loopholes through which hapless candidates are extorted by unconscionable service providers.
“This process will not, in any way, increase the cost of UTME registration which remains as it was in the previous year. As such, it is only the process of payment that has changed not the cost,” it said.
It would be recalled that in the previous years, candidates pay the sum of N700 at the centres. However, with the new policy, candidates simply walk into any registration centre and register without paying anything as the fee hitherto payable to the centre had been paid along with the cost of obtaining the ePINS.
