Hundreds of aggrieved candidates that sat for this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) stood for hours at the Lagos State House of Assembly on Tuesday protesting what they alleged are questionable marks awarded by the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB).
The students said the examination body awarded them fictitious marks and demanded the immediate firing of the JAMB Registrar, Prof. Don’t Ojerinde.
The protesters, comprising candidates from Ogun and Lagos states, arrived the Assembly complex at noon in a convoy of commercial buses, displayed placards deriding the conduct of the examination. They said the computer -based test adopted in the examination was fraught with technical hitches, describing it is a monumental fraud.
The students also accused JAMB of marking down candidates, alleging that Ojerinde encouraged mass failure in the exam in order to pave way for more enrolment in private universities.
One of the protesters, Taiwo Adetola, said the 176 awarded to her when she checked her result online was not her real result. She accused the exam body of manipulating the process to frustrate students seeking admission into various public universities.
Another candidate, who gave his name as Olamide Adele, said the exam body awarded him 159 when he first checked his result. To his surprise, When he rechecked four days, he discovered to his surprise that the mark had been inflated to 199.
Other candidates corroborated Olamide’s claim, as they claimed that JAMB added 40 marks to the scores of some candidates, but reversed itself a week later by deducting about 100 marks.
Olamide, who applied to the University of Lagos, recounted his frustrations writing UTME three times, noting that he scored 225 last year. According to him, the scores of 159 and later 199 credited to him were not a honest assessment of his performance.
More frustrating was the case of Adenike Oloyede, who complained that her computer system logged her out three times during the examination. She lost valuable time during each interruption, as the invigilator urged her to restart the computer.
Adenike expressed sadness with the 157 score credited to her after she wrote the exam at Ejigbo. She said that she sat for the exam for the first time in 2014, stressing that this year’s result was a fraud.
Another candidate, Temitope Ayeni, said she got a score of 246 after the exam, but was shocked to find “no result, absent from exam” when she wanted to print out the result for confirmation.
(Sam Otti, SUN NEWS ONLINE)