The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB says it generated N12 billion as income in 2017.
The registrar of the board, Ishaq Oloyede, said this at a press conference in Ilorin on Monday.
The registrar said the board remitted N7.8 billion to the Federal Government after deducting its expenses.
According to a report from The Punch, Mr. Oloyede said JAMB was able to remit the huge amount of money to the Federal Government because it blocked loopholes and checked wastage.
He said although JAMB is not a revenue-generating agency, it is also not a money-wasting establishment.
Mr. Oloyede said 1.7 million candidates sat for the last UTME, in addition to over 200,000 direct candidates, noting that the board expects two million candidates to sit for its 2018 examination.
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“The board had also devised means to check unscrupulous activities of candidates who do multiple registrations by deliberately writing their names wrongly with the intention to claim the result of the one with the highest score and thereafter demand correction of the name claiming that the fault is not theirs,” he said.
The board also said its findings showed that about 80 per cent of first class graduates of Nigerian universities scored below 200 in the UTME they sat for while applying for admission.
Mr. Oloyede said most of the first-class graduates from the nation’s universities were not exceptional but merely scored average marks in their Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination.
He said the board took statistics of the first-class graduates across the nation’s universities.
According to him, the findings showed that about 80 per cent of the graduates scored below 200 in the UTME they sat for while applying for admission to the university.
“There have been instances where candidates with poorer scores were dropped to less competitive courses but later crossed to the more competitive ones and emerged as the best during their graduation, in those courses”, he said.
He said the cut-off mark that JAMB put at 120 for 2017/2018 admission was a benchmark for admission of candidates and not a score for automatic admission.
“Some affiliated institutions were urging reduction of cut-off marks adopted by their parent universities. The affiliates had approached the Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu Adamu, to ask JAMB to prevail on the universities to reduce the cut-off marks. The affiliates were complaining that they were finding it difficult to get candidates to admit with the cut-off marks.
“Another technological means was devised to check cyber cafe operators from exploiting candidates who register for the UTME in their cafes while the Central Admission Processing System was introduced to ease processes of admission of qualified candidates”, Mr. Oloyede concluded.
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, is Nigeria’s entrance examination board for tertiary-level institutions.
The board administers similar examinations for applicants to Nigerian public and private universities, monotechnics, polytechnics and colleges of education.
