According to a report, the Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Professor Ishaq Oloyede, has declared that candidates who are under the age of 18 and are participating in the registration process for the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) will be subject to severe penalties.
This action is being taken with the intention of preserving the honesty of the testing procedure and ensuring that the predetermined age criteria are adhered to.
On Friday, Professor Oloyede said that out of the 780,202 candidates who had registered up to this point, 11,512 were found to be underage. This information was presented during a press conference that took place in Lagos, where he was present to oversee the registration process at different sites.
Concerned about the growing number of applicants under the age of 16, he pointed out that the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) had previously made accommodations for extraordinarily talented students under the age of 16, but that this concession is now being misused.
"We will impose some other penalty on them, that it will have been better for them to have stayed for their time because they are going to waste their money," Oloyede said to reporters.
He drew attention to the dishonest methods that were responsible for the increase in the number of registrations from minors, highlighting the fact that such acts weaken the legitimacy of the examination.
A breakdown of the current registration numbers was supplied by the Registrar, which revealed that on that specific day alone, 443 candidates who were under the age of 18 were registered out of a total of 18,813 registrations.
According to him, this pattern may be ascribed to a number of different circumstances, such as parents enrolling their children in primary school before the appropriate age and participating in unethical tactics in order to boost their children's academic prospects.
"Some parents do funny things to get them to SS2; some of them buy certificates and so on," Oloyede noted, expressing alarm over the extent to which some parents go to subvert established educational norms. They go to great efforts to get their children to attend SS2 school.
Despite the difficulties that have been encountered, the Registrar has confirmed that the registration procedure is going without any problems, and there are no intentions to extend it.
It was brought to his attention that the daily registration statistics had beyond the early expectations, which means that the participation rate is rather high.
"We budgeted for 60,000 per day; that's what we use in our planning, but from the third day, we started 80,000, 90,000 per day," he further revealed.
"By now, we have 782,000 plus, out of about 2 million we expect, and we are not up to the 14th day."
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