The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) yesterday said a total of 1,475,477 are expected to sit for this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), which kicks off next Tuesday.

JAMB Registrar, Prof Dibu Ojerinde, disclosed this at a briefing in Abuja.

He said the examination, which holds between March 10 and 21, would be fully computer-based.

Ojerinde said the transformation to full-blown Computer-Based Test mode, CBT, became imperative to help resolve the challenges faced by the board in the conduct of its examinations.

The exercise, he said, would hold in the troubled states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa amid tight security.

There is, however, a decrease of 156,695 applicants in the 2015 exercise compared to 1,632,172 that applied for the examination last year.

Some 208 prison inmates registered for the 2015 UTME. They will also have access to computers at both the Kaduna and Ikoyi prisons, while 192 visually impaired applied for the examination.

Imo has the highest number of candidates with 104,381, while FCT has the lowest with 4,085 candidates.

The examination will hold simultaneously in 400 examination venues in Nigeria and seven foreign centres among which are United Kingdom and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

He maintained that the board would use Biometric Verification Machine to help it curb examination practices, while students are expected to thumb print after the examinations.

The exercise, to be conducted in phases, would start by 6am. “The examination will not start until 8am. But there is need for accreditation,” Ojerinde said.

Meanwhile, students are to get their results two hours after taking the examination, according to the Registrar. The result, he said, would be sent to their phones.

It would be recalled that JAMB had last year cancelled the Paper-Pencil Test, PPT, for CBT, which it said would make its examinations more credible, devoid of malpractices and meet with international best practices.

•Adapted from a National Mirror report.