The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has announced that underage candidates who have registered for the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) will face sanctions for violating the minimum age requirement.
Speaking to reporters while monitoring registration across various centres in Lagos on Friday, JAMB Registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, revealed that out of the 780,202 candidates registered so far, 11,512 were underage.
He noted that while exceptionally brilliant students below 16 years had been granted special consideration, the opportunity was now being abused.
“We will impose some other penalty on them, that it will have been better for them to have stayed for their time, because they are going to waste their money,” Oloyede stated.
“This is the second week, the tenth day of the registration and we have registered 780,202, but surprisingly 11,512 of them are underage.
“When you are expecting 30-40, you can see the deceit. 11,512 are indicated as of today, even today alone we have 443 underage and this morning we have registered 18,813 so far and out of the 18,813, 443 of them are underage.”
The JAMB Registrar described the registration process as seamless, ruling out any possibility of an extension.
“It [extension] can never happen, because there is no problem, students are registering, and we are registering daily, more than what we had budgeted to, we had planned for, we are surpassing the target, so for me, these students are going to universities.”
Oloyede further disclosed that the number of registrations per day has exceeded initial expectations, indicating that the process is ahead of schedule.
“This is the first time that I will be registering 80,000 plus, yesterday we registered close to 100,000 across the country. We budgeted for 60,000 per day, that’s what we use in our planning, but from the third day, we started 80,000, 90,000 per day, so which means we will finish long before the time.
“Now we have 782,000 plus, out of about 2 million we are expecting, and we are not up to the 14th day, it is on Monday that will be our 14th day, so two weeks will be on Monday. So we still have Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, before you can say we are two weeks into our five weeks, and by that time we will be over 1 million, so what else do we expect, it has been smooth.”
