The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has arrested a 19-year-old female candidate, Rejoice Mordi, for allegedly falsifying her 2019 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) score from 164 to 264.
Mordi was arrested in Abuja on Tuesday following an invitation by the board to its headquarters in Bwari.
The father of the teenager, Frank Emordi, had petitioned the board for issuing her daughter two separate results from the same examination.
The board recalled that upon receipt of the complaint, it invited the candidate to appear before it.
JAMB’s Head of Information, Dr. Fabian Benjamin, stated this in a statement yesterday in Abuja.
Benjamin said the candidate confessed before the board that she got the fake UTME result from an agent, identified simply as IyanuOluwa, through a WhatsApp message and she wanted to see that it was changed on her UTME portal.
According to Benjamin, the candidate from Delta State explained that she met the agent who collected her registration number and those of three other candidates.
“The agent later sent a fake UTME result to Mordi’s phone,” Benjamin said in the statement.
He added that the candidate had been handed over to “security agents for further interrogation aimed at revealing her collaborators”.
The statement added: “The 19-year-old, who falsified her 2019 UTME result from 164 to 264, had petitioned for giving her two results in the 2019 UTME. The board, upon receipt of the complaint, invited the candidate who appeared before the board in company of her father, Frank Emordi.
“The Registrar, Prof Is-haq Oloyede, read the riot act to the petitioner and her father and gave them a grace period to retrace their steps, knowing that there is forensic analysis that she falsified the score.
“Upon the expiration of the opportunity, after a thorough examination of the evidences, the candidate owned up to her misdeeds. She said the agent sent the inflated result to her through a WhatsApp group, which she had deleted.
“Checks by the board revealed that the candidate had made three successful attempts at checking her result. However, on the candidate’s dashboard, 164 score still remained. She had since been handed over to the security agents for further interrogation.”
The candidate’s father appealed to the registrar for clemency.
He said: “I talked to her (Rejoice) and she said a guy she met at the centre collected her registration number and three of her friends’. The man was the one who forwarded the results to them through WhatsApp. If she had informed me about that, I would not have followed her to the JAMB office.”
