UTME: JAMB Decries Underage Candidates Registration, Warns Applicants Risk Severe Penalty

LAGOS -The Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, on Friday in Lagos, expressed dismay at the high rate of underage candidates registering in the ongoing 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

The JAMB Registrar pledged that the board will penalise any applicant who wrongly claims underage during the ongoing UTME registration exercise.

He said, “As of today, we have registered 780,202. This is the second week, the 10th day of the registration. Surprisingly 11,512 of them are underage..

He warned that allowing underage children to register for the 2025 UTME amounts to a waste of the resources of the Board, reiterating that applicants who claimed underage would be penalised.

“When you are expecting 30 to 40, you can see the deceit. Today alone, we have registered 18,813 so far, and out of the figure, 443 of them are underage, and that’s part of the introduction this year that we could have those who are underage. We could see what their problems were, we could pick from among them those who are sincerely underage and gifted.”

He revealed that the global standard for exceptional students is one in a million.

“You know you have world standards. Ordinarily, it’s about one in a million. So when people give examples, how many of them do you have in the whole of America, in the whole of Canada that you are referring to? Is one in a million.

“We want to get them up, we want to see them but not these fake figures that people are just parading, people cannot even score 200 over 400. This is because their parents had no time for them and enrolled them underage in primary school and so on; did some funny things to get them to SS2. Some of them buy certificates, and so on, that’s what some of the parents do.”

“Those we call candidates are those who are 16 and above; these are not candidates; we are not regarding them as candidates; they need to prove that they are candidates. But if we now find out that you cannot prove your age, we will impose some penalties on them, and it would have been better for them to have waited for their time because they are going to waste our money,” Oloyede said.