Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has devised a means of identifying candidates planning to cheat in the forthcoming Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, disclosing that no fewer than 211,000 candidates on Thursday sat for the 2025 UTME Mock exam conducted by the Board across designated Computer-Based Test (CBT) centres in the country.
The 2025 UTME is scheduled to commence on April 25 at approved CBT centres across the country.
JAMB stated that it has deployed a decoy website targeting rogue websites that assist candidates to engage in cheating during the exam.
JAMB Registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, who disclosed this while monitoring the exercise at a CBT centre in Bwari, Abuja, assured that the results of the mock examination would be released on Friday.
“They will have the results tomorrow (Friday). The results will be ready. Those who finished, we are working now on their results, but we want to compare with the second batch, the third batch, and so on. And see that everything is working well. But later by tomorrow, they will have the results,” he said.
The JAMB registrar said the exercise was aimed at testing the board’s readiness for the main examination and experimenting with new strategies to improve the process.
Oloyede added, “The word is mock, and we want to say so far so good, what we want to do is to try some things. As students are getting wiser, we are also getting better.
“Because we are doing certain things to ensure that those things are done. So we are trying to make sure that when we go for the exam, we will have taken experience and taken some lessons from our experience at the mock level.”
The Registrar, who said the only way to pass UTME is by studying hard, expressed concerns that some candidates are patronising rogue websites in order to cheat in the exam, adding that JAMB had also opened a decoy website targeting such individuals.
Oloyede therefore advised candidates to steer clear of fraudulent websites and individuals claiming to offer assistance during the examination.
He further stated, “We need to let the students know that the best way to pass the examination, UTME in particular, is to study. We are aware of some rogue websites asking people to come and pay that they can help.
“It cannot work. We have also opened our own rogue website. And as of this morning, about 180 students have paid. Some of them are paying N30,000 for something that will never work. To attempt to cheat is already an infraction. So those who paid into that account, looking for questions, we are going to deal firmly with them. We are going to cancel their results, both UTME and DE (Direct Entry).
“UTME is not a school-based examination. We register students individually. And that is why we tell the students, do not give (out) your registration number. Do not register by proxy.
“Do not give your registration number to anybody. Because some of these schools want to be able to brag that, 10 students from my school scored 280. There was a state where even the governor of a state was misinformed, and they were celebrating nothing. So this type of thing that people want to cut corners, we are abreast of all this. And we are doing everything possible (to stop it).”
