Education

JAMB Reduces UTME Exam Hours

Published

7 years ago

March 30, 2017

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Registrar/Chief Executive Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, today in Kaduna, during the opening ceremony of a strategic planning retreat on the monitoring, supervision and evaluation of 2017 UTME stated that candidates writing the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) this year would spend two hours instead of three hours.

He said the reduction in exam time was in line with international best standards and practices where no candidate is kept in an examination such as UTME for more than two hours. In his words: “We are going to reduce the duration of the examination for this year’s UTME. You cannot keep children of this age for three hours. For their age, the maximum time you can keep them is two hours. So, we are considering the reduction in the time they spend because once it is more than two hours you can’t expect that they will retain their presence of mind.”

Oloyede added that out of 13 commercial banks and the Nigeria Postal Service that have signified interest in the sales of the admission forms, only nine have paid for the number of application documents they required in the first instance. In a related development, since JAMB started the sale of the 2017 UTME form, candidates have been finding it hard to complete their registration. Some have been complaining about difficulties in getting the pin to be used to register for the exam.