The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) on Wednesday explained why it had not released the results of the 2019 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination.
The board said it discovered that some candidates who wrote the examination engaged in massive fraud and impersonation, putting their results in doubt.
JAMB’s Head of Information, Dr. Fabian Benjamin, stated this in an interview in Abuja on Wednesday.
He said the board has started screening the results of all the candidates who wrote the examination and would release them as soon as it finished the exercise.
Benjamin said: “We will not release the results in a hurry. We will do a lot of crosschecking and matchmaking to be sure that nobody that was engaged in illicit act go scot free.
“We will release the results as soon as we finish checking the results to ensure that all those ones that we caught in various illicit registration acts are properly dealt with and those that we could not arrest are withheld.
“We will release the results when we finish doing our screening. We are screening the whole results.
“We don’t have the numbers now but we won’t release any result until we are sure of the whole thing.”
He said the board has so far arrested over 100 persons for impersonation and other fraudulent practices during the examination.
According to him, the board would fish out anyone who was involved in sharp practices during the examination through their results and withhold them.
The JAMB spokesperson said: “We are picking them across the nation. As at today, we have picked up over a hundred candidates and we are still picking.
“Though we may not be able to pick all of them because of logistics problem and the state but what we are doing now for those we could not pick who may have written the exam and gone, we are fishing them out true their result.”
Benjamin also said the board was investigating cases of biometric verification failure in some states.
He assured that the board would do the needful once it finished its investigation and found the reported cases to be genuine.
“We will not be able to say genuine now until we do our due diligence. We are investigating because I told you that we have cases of illicit registration and we discovered that some of them created some scene when they discovered that their time for the exams clashed and they could not write the exam.
“We are giving everybody the benefit of doubt. We will look at all the perimeters and ensure that no one whose case is actually genuine suffers injustice.
“When we finish our exams we will be able to look at the whole thing (biometric issues),” he added.
