The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, has stated that candidates sitting for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, would from this year onwards spend two hours instead of the three hours that used to be the case. This was disclosed in Kaduna on Wednesday by the JAMB Registrar, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, 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 explained that the reduction of hours was in line with international best standards and practices where no candidate is kept in an examination such as UTME for more than two hours.
“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,” the board’s chief executive said.
He further disclosed that a total of 240,000 candidates have so far registered for the examination which has been scheduled for May 20, barely one week after the commencement of the sale of forms which is expected to end on April 22.
Oloyede added that out of 13 commercial banks and the Nigeria Postal Service that have signified interest in the sales of the admission forms, only nine have paid for the number of application documents they required in the first instance.