With effect from 2017, candidates sitting for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination would need to burn through two hours rather than three hours, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, said on Wednesday.
As indicated by JAMB, an aggregate of 240,000 applicants have so far enrolled for the examination which has been booked for May 20, scarcely one week after the beginning of the sale of forms which is relied upon to end on April 22.
The organization said the lessening of hours was in accordance with global best principles and practices where no candidate is kept in an examination, for example, UTME for over two hours.
The Registrar/Chief Executive of JAMB, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, stated this in Kaduna, during the opening ceremony of a strategic planning retreat on the monitoring, supervision and evaluation of 2017 UTME with the theme: “Inclusiveness and sensitisation of key external actors.”
He said, “We are going to reduce the duration of the examination for this year’s UTME. You cannot keep children of this age for three hours. For their age, the maximum time you can keep them is two hours. So, we are considering the reduction in the time they spend because once it is more than two hours you can’t expect that they will retain their presence of mind.”
Oloyede added that out of 13 business banks and the Nigeria Postal Service that have meant enthusiasm for the sales of the admission forms, just nine have paid for the quantity of utilization documents they required in the first instace.
Zenith Bank has obtained N2.5 billion worth of forms while Jaiz Bank secured N256 million worth of forms.
