JAMB set to review criteria for selection of examination centres

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) says it will review criteria for selecting centres for its Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

Fabian Benjamin, the board’s Head of Media and Information, disclosed this in a telephone interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Tuesday in Lagos.

Benjamin acknowledged that there were technical hitches in about 20 of the 520 centres registered to host the 2016 UTME on the Computer Based Test (CBT) platform nationwide.

“I want to say that we are making efforts to come up with new selection method and approval of the centres we shall be using for the conduct of our examination henceforth.

“We shall be considering using more of public owned centres and a few organised privately owned centres.

“From statistics available to us, we have discovered that most of the issues we had with centres during the examination were associated with those with private concerns,” he said.

While expressing the board’s regret over the technical problem, Benjamin, however, said he was happy that the conduct of the examination was generally successful.

He noted that over 1.6 million candidates sat for the examination within and outside the country.

Benjamin reiterated that the board had not cancelled the entire results of the 2016 examination as was being speculated.

According to him, the board is finalizing modalities for the re-take of the examination by only those with genuine cases. (NAN)