When news broke that JAMB’s registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, had broken down in tears while taking responsibility for the chaotic Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) in six states, it confirmed the frustration that thousands of students had been silently carrying....CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING.>>
According to Channels Television, one of those affected was Mario Chukwuma, a young student who has written JAMB twice already. In 2023, he scored 240—enough to keep hope alive. But this year, his result came as a shocker: 157, with a glaring 40 in Mathematics, the subject he not only excels in but had recently been celebrated for.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!“Last year I just won best in Mathematics in my school and I am here scoring 40,” Mario said during his appearance on Channels Television’s Rubbing Minds. His disbelief quickly turned into concern when he saw other high-performing students from his tutorial center recording the same low scores. “I knew something was wrong.”
JAMB later confirmed that a glitch had impacted the exams in Lagos and five southeastern states, prompting a rushed decision to schedule a rewrite. But the timing, many felt, was chaotic. “We had the news on Wednesday. By Thursday, I was told to reprint and found out I was writing the next day in Ikorodu,” Mario recalled.
Mrs. Olanrewaju Oniyitan, Executive Director of Seed Care Foundation, also on the show, highlighted how the 48-hour notice excluded students in rural and low-income areas. Some had WAEC and JAMB exams on the same day—one at 6:30 a.m., the other at 8 a.m.
Though many commend the registrar’s honesty, students like Mario are still left with questions. His second attempt was marred by yet another round of technical glitches that cost him ten minutes of test time.
“The second situation we had—I had my exams by 2:00 p.m. Okay, the normal processes of logging in and everything went well. But during my own exam, a girl sitting beside me accidentally touched one of the cables, and seven of us experienced server issues. We got disconnected,” he explained.
“They told us, ‘Calm down, don’t worry, we’ll fix it.’ We said, ‘No problem.’ Then they logged us out, and we were taken back to the homepage where you enter your registration number. They assured us, ‘Don’t worry, your time isn’t counting.’ That was cool,” he said.
“And it happened that ten minutes to the end, I hadn’t answered half of my Physics questions this second time. While I was writing, we got to about ten minutes before the end of the exam—and it just cut. They just told us to submit and go home. But I spoke to one of the coordinators and asked her what happened. I asked, ‘Can something be done about this?’ And she smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.’ What that means, I do not know,” he expressed.
