The Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, has disclosed that over 11,553 underage candidates have registered for the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
Oloyede made this revelation in Lagos on Friday while inspecting approved computer-based test centres where the registration process is ongoing.
He stated that 782,027 candidates had been registered in the last ten days, with 11,553 of them being underage.
“Now, we have registered 782,027, and 11,553 of them are underage. So, you can see that as we are registering, the system is reporting from all over the country. Out of the expected two million candidates, we’re not yet at the 14th day,” he said.
Oloyede noted that JAMB had introduced a system to track underage candidates, which would help in understanding their situations and identifying exceptionally gifted students.
“This year, we’ve introduced a system that allows us to identify and track underage candidates. This will help us understand their issues and even identify those who might be genuinely gifted but still underage,” he explained.
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He also raised concerns about the growing trend of parents enrolling their children for UTME at a young age.
“It has become a common thing now, where parents, whether mothers or fathers, are registering their underage children, sometimes due to pressure or other reasons.”
Regarding the registration process, Oloyede acknowledged some delays due to new technical measures but assured that the situation was under control.
“You are here. You were here last year. See if you can find any power outages, network failures, and so forth. I just heard recently that due to the technical measures put in place this year, things are a bit slow,” he said.
Despite the challenges, JAMB has seen significant progress in registrations, with over 80,000 candidates being registered daily.
“Yesterday, we registered close to 100,000 across the country. And we have budgeted for 60,000 per day. That’s what we use in our planning,” he added.
