The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has vowed to take stringent action against underage applicants in the ongoing 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) registration, warning that those who attempt to exploit the process will face penalties.
Speaking during an inspection tour of registration centers in Lagos on Friday, JAMB Registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, revealed that out of 780,202 candidates registered so far, a staggering 11,512 were underage.
He lamented that JAMB had initially granted exceptions for exceptionally brilliant students who had not reached the required 16 years, but the opportunity was now being widely abused.
“We will impose some other penalty on them, that it will have been better for them to have stayed for their time because they are going to waste their money,” Oloyede stated.
Highlighting the extent of the issue, he added: “This is the second week, the tenth day of the registration, and we have registered 780,202 candidates, but surprisingly, 11,512 of them are underage. When you are expecting 30-40, you can see the deceit. Even today alone, we have 443 underage applicants. This morning, we have registered 18,813 so far, and out of that, 443 of them are underage.”
Oloyede also dismissed any speculation about a possible extension of the UTME registration deadline, emphasizing that the process had been smooth and efficient.
“It [extension] can never happen because there is no problem. Students are registering, and we are registering daily, more than what we had budgeted for. We had planned for 60,000 per day, but from the third day, we started registering 80,000 to 90,000 per day, meaning we will finish long before the deadline.”
Providing an update on the registration progress, he noted: “Now we have 782,000 plus, out of about 2 million we are expecting, and we are not even up to the 14th day yet. Monday will mark our second week, and by then, we will have surpassed 1 million registrations. So what else do we expect? It has been smooth.”
