effect from 2017, candidates sitting for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation
Examination would have to spend two hours instead of three hours, the Joint
Admissions and Matriculation Board, said on Wednesday.
According to JAMB, a total of 240,000 candidates have so far registered for the
examination which has been scheduled for May 20, barely one week after the
commencement of the sale of forms which is expected to end on April 22.
The organisation said the reduction of hours was in line with international
best standards and practices where no candidate is kept in an examination such
as UTME for more than two hours.
The Registrar/Chief Executive of JAMB, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, stated this in
Kaduna, during the opening ceremony of a strategic planning retreat on the
monitoring, supervision and evaluation of 2017 UTME with the theme:
“Inclusiveness and sensitisation of key external actors.”
He said, “We are going to reduce the duration of the examination for this
year’s UTME. You cannot keep children of this age for three hours. For their
age, the maximum time you can keep them is two hours. So, we are considering
the reduction in the time they spend because once it is more than two hours you
can’t expect that they will retain their presence of mind.”
Oloyede adde that out of 13 commercial banks and the Nigeria Postal Service
that have signified interest in the sales of the admission forms, only nine
have paid for the number of application documents they required in the first
instance.
Zenith Bank has procured N2.5 billion worth of forms while Jaiz Bank
procured N256 million worth of forms.
