The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has expressed that inadequate funding posed a challenge to the conduct of the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME.
Speaking on Wednesday, when he received a delegation of the Senate Committee on Tertiary Institution and Tertiary Education Trust Fund in his office in Bwari, Abuja the Registrar, JAMB, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, said:
“The major challenge facing the board has to do with funding. We take N5,000 from each candidate.
“We do not even have the money to conduct the examination.
“Rather, we call on third party to do some of the things and they only give some commission to JAMB because we do not have enough money to invest.
“Conduct of examination across the country requires intensive human participation; you will recruit invigilators and monitors and then it costs so much money to set exam questions.
“The capital allocation is N1 billion; the release so far is N45.57million; the overhead cost is N50 million allocated, but N24.9 million is what we have received so far.
“The N24.9 million given is not sufficient to pay electricity bills because all the 36 states and zonal offices depend on what comes from headquarters for their funding.”
Oloyede appealed to the National Assembly to review its decision on the bill seeking to validate the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination for three years to avoid harm.
In the same vein, the exam body said tertiary institutions in the country have not been able to successfully fill 70 per cent of their admission quotas by candidates in the last five years due to uniform cutoff marks adopted by the federal government.
Oloyede said: “Every year, we do not meet 70% of the quota contrary to what people think that there are more people than the existing places.
We have in the last five years, not filled 70% of the quota. We need to ask a question, why? The simple answer is a mismatch.“I can say it without any doubt that it has never been obeyed. It is only obeyed in the papers. When you talk about the practice of it, there are hundreds of people in our universities, polytechnics and colleges of education that have not gone through JAMB.
“The reason is that we are setting standards that cannot be obeyed. They (universities, polytechnics and colleges of education) will now go through the back door and recruit people with 160, 150, 140 and some who did not take JAMB at all because you have made 180 the minimum.”