The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) says candidates who could not sit the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) within their scheduled time due to hitches will now take the examination on Saturday.

In a statement on Monday, the board’s spokesperson, Fabian Benjamin, said out of the 1,586,765 that indicated an interest in sitting the examination, only 80,166 are outstanding.

“The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has announced that all candidates, who could not sit the 2023 UTME within their scheduled time owing to no fault of theirs, would be rescheduled to take the examination on Saturday, May 6,” Mr Benjamin said.

This year’s UTME, which began on April 25, experienced technical issues in centres in some states that made some candidates unable to sit the exam within their scheduled time.

“It is equally noteworthy that the board had informed Nigerians that it would be using some novel, innovative methods in conducting the exercise, with the aim of completely arresting incidence of examination infractions,” the JAMB statement explained.

It added, “This has been largely achieved as the exercise recorded the lowest reported cases of infractions but with equally emerging challenges on account of human negligence, which led to some candidates not being able to sit the examination on the first day.”

According to JAMB, on the first day of the 2023 UTME, many candidates in some centres could not sit the examination and others on subsequent days due to diverse reasons, including the wrong address of CBT centres.

“It should be noted that the name of the centre, which is Beautiful Beginning CBT Centre, Apo, Abuja, featured ‘Gwagwalada’ rather than ‘Apo’, hence misleading the candidates,” JAMB explained.

Failure to send notifications of exam date and time or belated sending of the notifications was identified as another factor.

“Among the candidates, who have not taken their examination, are those whose centres could not carry their full capacity of 250, as such, had to be batched with some of these centres taking 150 candidates, rather than the 250 allotted to them per session,” the JAMB statement further said.

The exam body pointed out that those with mismatched data are other candidates affected, accusing the candidates for failing to double-check the information in time.

It urged all candidates yet to write the UTME to print their slips on or before May 5, to know the time and venue of their rescheduled examination,

The statement JAMB would release the results of candidates who had sat the exam on May 2.

He stated that the board had delayed the release to ensure necessary screenings were concluded and that the mean and standard deviation were reasonably obtained.

(NAN)