Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) yesterday said from now on, candidates who purposely break the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) registration guidelines, would receive equal punishments as those found guilty of cheating and plagiarism in exams.

The Registrar, Professor Is-haq Oloyede made the statement during the 2019 Critical Stakeholder’s Meeting in Abuja. He said exam registration infractions which previously were no penalised, would be treated as exam fraud and offenders would not be allowed to write the UTME.

He said a separate indicator was created for deaf (mute) candidates during the Computer Based Test (CBT) to differentiate them for special attention at the examination centres while efforts were on to provide options of Special Centres or mainstreaming the visually impaired.

The registrar said any candidate that cannot be verified by BVM must not be allowed to take the examination under any guise adding that 25 candidates “whose fingerprints could not be captured during registration from centres across the country were brought to JAMB Headquarters and were registered appropriately. They will come to the headquarters in Abuja to also sit for their examination and not any other centre.”

He said CBT centres no longer require password from candidates to provide any of the services to them and that all they needed was to login with CBT Centre User Account and enter the candidate’s email/profile code/registered cell phone number to render the service.

He said “It is now an offence to demand for any password of candidate before rendering any service.”

The board he said, was still facing a number of challenges which included extortion of candidates by some centres, attempts on cloning of registration SIMs, Illegitimate movement of routers to unregister locations, candidates patronizing cybercafés and others and sale of materials related to JAMB registration or examination at centres such as Compact Disc, examination pack, examination question and answer booklet.