The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has stated that most of the challenges encountered by applicants during the registration for the 2021 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME) and Direct Entry (DE), were due to the applicants’ failure to follow instructions.

The Board stated that candidates were responsible for over 80% of the registration hitches.

The registrar of the Board, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, stated this on Wednesday, during a monitoring exercise for some prospective candidates, who were unable to register for the exam during the registration window, which closed on May 29, 2021.

The monitoring exercise, which allows prospective candidates to fill and submit a form on the challenge(s) that prevented them from registering for the exam before now, was to enable the exam body to clear those with genuine cases for this year’s exam after following the required registration processes.

But a visit to some of the centres in Kogo, Bwari and Garki 2, Abuja, which are playing host to the exercise in the Federal Capital Territory, revealed that almost all the students that blamed JAMB’s system for the challenges they encountered were actually the architects of their own registration challenges.

While the affected prospective candidates had blamed their challenges on their inability to secure e-pin or generate profile code on time, findings revealed that almost all of those interviewed failed to follow stipulated registration procedures as announced by the exam body.

A candidate, Emmanuel Ojo, who admitted to his mistake, when a JAMB official accessed his information on the exam body’s system, to unravel why he was having issues generating a PIN, said he only sent his National Identification Number without indicating NIN on it while another said he erroneously added double space when sending his personal details to the registration code.

Hafsat Ahmed, a prospective DE candidate, said she tried severally to generate an e-PIN but didn’t succeed on time, but an official of JAMB also proved to her that the fault was from her.

“I have been trying to get the profile code but it was not coming, when I finally got it on May 27, 2021, I was told that the e-PIN was not available,” she said.

For his part, a would-be UTME candidate, Abraham Williams, said he also tried severally to get the profile code, admitting that he was probably not following the required format.

It was observed that the issue that led to the registration difficulties faced by many of the prospective candidates that trooped out for the exercise were mainly due to use of double spacing in sending messages for profile code generation, name not matched with the one on NIMC database, phone number already used by another candidate, insufficient balance to generate profile code that cost only N50, among others.

Reacting to the development, Prof. Oloyede expressed concern that many of the candidates failed to follow simple instructions on registration process as put in place by the Board, adding that over 80 per cent of the challenges encountered were self-inflicted by the applicants.

“Many of them were sending wrong things and commands for NIN, making NIMC unable to verify such numbers.
The problems are self-created by the candidates, you are sending messages for a profile code and no credit of N50,” he added.