JAMB warns UTME candidates against paying for result 'upgrade'

Reports had on Sunday emerged that an online fraudster, one Mr Magaji who paraded as a ”JAMB Upgrade Director,” was urging candidates to call his telephone number 09038747733 for payment instructions if they wish to “upgrade” their results.

However, the board spokesman, Dr Fabian Benjamin, reacting to the news, called the fraud “ignorant” warning candidates not to listen to the lies. He says no one fails or passes the UTME (popularly called Jamb) as “it is selection exam, which is dependent on general performance.”

Benjamin tells Punch:

“Obviously, this fraud is so ignorant and she or he definitely misunderstood the 2016 incident in which the parameters used for the examination were wrong and therefore had to be corrected.

“In the process of transforming the grades of candidates for the 2016 exams, the examiners used the wrong parameters.

“What we call ‘transformation’ is actually a measurement instrument. So, when we discovered the problem, we did the right transformation but people took it out of proportion to interpret it as addition or subtraction of marks. We only did the right thing.

“It was never an upgrade, as this fraud and others in his category deemed it to be.

“Even in the 2016 incident, the candidates affected were not up to 60,000 out of the 1.5 million that wrote the exams.

“There could be nothing called results upgrade because, in JAMB, no one fails or passes. It is a selection exam, which is dependent on general performance.

“Though you may not score enough to get you admitted into a tertiary institution, no one fails.”

The spokesman, however, maintained that the examination is reviewing CCTVs in all centres in order to ascertain how much candidates and supervisors complied with rules and regulations.