Yemi Obafemi
The Joint Admission Matriculation Board has announced the results of total of 1,842,464 candidates who sat for the 2024 UTME have been released.
Friday April 19 to 29 April, more than 1.9 million candidates took the computer-based examination to rank candidates seeking admission into Nigerian tertiary institutions.
The Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB), Is-haq Oloyede, a professor made the announcement at a press briefing in Abuja on Monday.
According to Oloyede, 1,989,668 registered for the exam while 80,810 were absent. A total of 1,904,189 sat the UTME within the six days of the examination.
In his speech Oloyede said “Out of a total of 1,989,668 registered candidates, 80,810 were absent. A total of 1,904,189 sat the UTME within the six days of the examination…”.
He said 8,401, representing 0.5 per cent of candidates, scored 300 and above in the examination. The maximum score obtainable in the UTME is 400.
He said 77,070, representing 4.2 per cent, scored 250 and above and that 439,974, representing 24 per cent, scored 200 and above.
He added that 1,402,490, representing 76 per cent of candidates, scored below 200.
He said this year UTME had more female candidates, for the first time in three years, 1,007,275 (50.6 per cent) female candidates registered for the examinations compared to 982,393 (49.4 per cent) male candidates.
Last year, 49.7 per cent of candidates were female. In 2022, they represented 48.4 per cent of the total candidates.
Oloyede said that 78 of the withheld results are under investigation for alleged examination misconduct, 4,594 for “procedural investigation of candidates, 2,896 “under investigation on verification,” and 57,056 for centre-based investigations.
For the centre-based investigation, 18 centres are involved, with the breakdown presented as Edo 1, Akwa Ibom, Delta 2 and Kwara 1.
However, he noted that there’s a downward trend in the cases of examination infractions noticed in the UTME since the introduction of computer-based tests almost ten years ago.
He said the board only had 78 cases of examination misconduct in the just-concluded UTME. “Even these cases are largely in terms of impersonation and smuggling of devices into the examination hall,” he said.
He added that JAMB is determined to sustain the tempo through the adoption and automation of all its processes, starting from registration and examination to admission.
“The Board witnessed a near-zero infraction in the 2024 UTME except for a few cases, representing a tiny fraction of what was reported last year. This is encouraging, and the Board is poised to consolidate on the successes recorded,” he said
