Coronavirus: JAMB will not suspend UTME- Registrar

At a time when the world battles the Coronavirus Pandemic, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) says it will not suspend the 2020 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

In an interview with a Punch correspondent, the JAMB’s registrar, Prof Is-haq Oloyede, said centres where the UTME is being conducted, are taking precautionary measures. Professor further stated that there were no crowds at the exam centres.

“It had been very helpful to put those measures in place and I appreciate the CBT centres. I went to a CBT centre on Wednesday and I could see that even as good as our own precautionary measures were, the school proprietress provided better facilities in terms of screening and the layout was very impressive. I understand that many of the CBT centres made separate provisions against the coronavirus. You can trust Nigerians that when it comes to protecting our lives, we don’t joke with that.

“There are no crowds at our CBT centres. This is because although when we started, we were getting 250 persons per session at a centre. But by Thursday, that had been reduced. By now, we have done for over 1.3 million candidates of the 1.9 million candidates who registered. By the end of Thursday, what remained at our CBT centres was so insignificant that they didn’t constitute any threat. This is apart from the fact that so far so good, we have also made provisions to ensure that candidates are not unnecessarily crowded in a place,” Prof. Oloyede said.