By FRED EZEH, Abuja

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has blamed candidate errors for most of the challenges being faced in registering for the 2021 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

JAMB mentioned that over 80 per cent of candidates that are accusing JAMB of frustrating their efforts to participate in the 2021 UTME exercise have failed to follow the simple rules highlighted by JAMB for successful registration.

JAMB Registrar Prof Ishaq Oloyede made the observation in Abuja during a monitoring exercise for some prospective candidates who were unable to register for the examination during the normal registration window that ended on May 29.

JAMB had provided the window to allow prospective candidates to fill and submit a form on the challenges that prevented them from registering for the examination before the deadline. This was to enable JAMB to clear those with genuine cases for this year’s examination after following the required registration process.

The JAMB Registrar and his monitoring team were at Bwari and Garki centres, where they observed that almost all the candidates that blamed their challenges on their inability to secure e-pins or generate profile codes on time had failed to follow stipulated registration procedures as announced by JAMB.

For instance, a candidate, Emmanuel Ojo, who admitted to his mistakes, confirmed that he only sent his National Identification Number (NIN) without indicating NIN on it, while another candidate said he erroneously added double space when sending his personal details to the registration code.

Another candidate, Hafsat Ahmed, a prospective Direct Entry (DE) candidate, said she tried severally to generate e-pin but couldn’t succeed on time, but an official of JAMB proved to her that the fault was hers.

A prospective candidate, Abraham Williams, said he also tried repeatedly to generate the profile code but could not. He suspected that he may not have been following the required format to get it on time.

It was observed that the issues that led to the registration challenges faced by many candidates include the use of double space in sending messages for profile code generation, names not matched with the ones used in NIMC profiles, phone numbers already used by another candidate, insufficient phone credit balance to generate profile codes that cost N50, among others. (Daily Sun)

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