24,148 WRITES JOINT ADMISSION MATRICULATION BOARD EXAMINATIONS AS AT AUGUST, SAYS REGISTRAR

“Why are they not asking WAEC (to reduce fee)? Why are they not asking NECO? Why are they not asking NABTEB? Why JAMB? We charge the least and you are saying reduce. The issue is because we have a means of managing the resources properly and we now have what you can call surplus and because we are open enough to return the surplus to the government, you now say we should crash the cost,” he said.

Penpushing said the Registrar stated that the examination body would only follow a directive ”from the appropriate quarters on the cost of UTME”,adding“ What should be the basis of crashing the cost assuming the method we are using now is no longer available and we have to use the old method,”

Oloyede said, “If the Government feels we should adjust, we will adjust and not as a result of unqualified, baseless requests’, and while speaking on the staff promotion examination, he said the exercise was to ensure the board’s readiness to always conduct seamless examinations.

He said the new software used in the examination which cost N6 million will now be deployed for third party clients examinations,”to avoid issues that trailed the ones conducted for Police Service Commission (PSC).

“One of the last ones we did is the PSC and we saw that because we are trying to save money, some mischievous people wanted to embarrass us.The software we were using before has some inbuilt mechanism that it must carry 180 questions that if not complete it will not move. So you can tell people to write exam from question 1 to 120 but don’t do anything below.

”In such an instance, some mischievous people decided to see what is below and started saying they were setting Arabic and so on. We saw that was capable of generating unnecessary ill-feelings,” Oloyede said.