Candidates, fraudsters seek attention on JAMB’s Facebook page

For candidates sitting for this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, which has been a subject of controversy over technical hitches and other challenges, there are no better places to send their complaints than social media pages.

The Facebook page of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, the organisation responsible for UTME, is particularly awash with complaints by candidates whose results have yet to be released or whose scores fall below their expectations.

In the past few weeks, hundreds of candidates or their representatives have lodged complaints on the Facebook visitor’s post section, urging the examination body to attend to diverse issues.

While a few candidates took advantage of the forum to vent their frustration without pointing out specific things that went wrong with the test, many, by their complaints, sounded genuine. The latter gave their examination numbers, names and specific subjects where they had problems. They went further, in many cases, to specify challenges they encountered during or after sitting for the examination.

“There was a mistake in my result; my registration number is 65586793EH. I had 73 in English Language and extremely low marks in the remaining subjects. I know there is a mistake somewhere because the questions were extremely simple. I do not know if the problem came from my centre, the Federal College, Akoka, Lagos, where we were disconnected from the server and later reconnected. I plead with JAMB to rectify my problem because I really prepared for the examination, and the questions were simple enough,” a candidate posted on Sunday(Yesterday).

Also writing on the page, one Chinonso Ogbomon, said his scores did not reflect his preparation and what he perceived as excellent performance during the examination.

Also, fraudsters might have seized the opportunity of the “frustration” in this year’s examination to take advantage of desperate admission seekers. Advertising on the Facebook page of JAMB were fake individuals who claimed that they could assist unsuspecting candidates to increase their scores.