15th February, 2025
By Paul Dada
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, says it has detected that 11,553 underage candidates have registered for the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME)
Making this disclosure on Friday was the JAMB Registrar, Professor Oloyede made the disclosure in Lagos. Oloyede made the development known while inspecting approved computer-based test centres where candidates are being registered.
He said out of the 782,027 candidates that registered for the UTME in the last 10 days, 11,553 of them were under age.
He said, “Now, we have registered 782,027, and 11,553 of them are underage. So, you can see that as we are registering, the system is reporting from all over the country. Out of the expected two million candidates, we’re not yet at the 14th day.
“Monday will mark our 14th day. So, in two weeks, we would have completed about half of our registration process, and by that time, we expect to have over one million candidates registered. So far, everything has been smooth,” he said.
Oloyede pointed out that on Friday alone, 443 underage candidates were registered, with 18,813 candidates successfully registered that morning.
“Today alone, we have 443 underage candidates, and out of the 18,813 registered this morning, 443 are underage. This year, we’ve introduced a system that allows us to identify and track underage candidates.
“This will help us understand their issues and even identify those who might be genuinely gifted but still underage,” he explained.
Still about the under age candidates, Oloyede said, “It has become a common thing now, where parents whether mothers or fathers are registering their underage children, sometimes due to pressure or other reasons.”
