JAMB Holds Amid Malpractices In Lagos

The Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) was, Saturday, held in Lagos State amid delay in capturing the candidates’ biometric data, malpractices, and shortage of question papers.

The examination started in Yewa Junior High School, Diary Farm, Agege, Ikotun High School, Government Technical College, Ikotun and Igando Community High School, around 10:00am, an hour behind official starting time.

When Sunday Vanguard visited some centres in the state, some candidates were seen shortly before the commencement of the examination copying supposedly answers from their cell phones into small sheets of papers, which they hid in secluded parts of their body including their private parts to beat security officers.

An official of Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps screening candidates for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination at the African Church Grammer School Ita-Eko, Abeokuta, Ogun State, Saturday.

Also, some clever ones went into the examination halls with their cell phones making it easy for them to cheat.
Our correspondent at Vetland Senior High School in Ifako-Ijaiye Local Government Area witnessed officials tackling the challenge of biometric screening of candidates within the scheduled time.

The chief examiner at the centre, who simply identified herself as Mrs Olajide, had to announce to those affected and who had earlier been screened manually to go into classrooms within their examination numbers to settle down. While the exam was going on, she went round to announce that every candidate should ensure to do biometric screening before leaving the exam hall.

Candidates writing the UTME at the University of Abuja, Saturday.

“These are some of the candidates that the machine could not capture their data and we cannot continue to waste time on them. That is why I asked them to go in first while the official will go round to do their biometric capturing later,” she said.

There was also a situation of candidates not having all their subjects combination in one booklet and there was no left over questions papers across subject combination.

Some candidates who had economics, chemistry, government as subjects combination were affected.

The supervisors at some centres managed the situation by asking affected candidates to switch the question papers with those who had theirs complete pending when they would be ready to do them.

“And we’re able to manage the problem with understanding,” Mr. Yekini Olawale, a supervisor at Yewa Junior High School who teaches at Lagos City Polytechnic, said.

On malpractices, although many supervisors denied knowledge of any, a JAMB official in charge of the 11 centres in Ikotun/Idimu area said that over 30 candidates were caught cheating in exam hall and that some invigilators aided the practice such that he had to re-arrange some of the invigilators at Comprehensive College, Ikotun, having suspected foul play