JAMB 2017 - No More Scratch Cards

Prof. Ishaq Oloyede

According to reports from an interview conducted with JAMB registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, his administration that came on board about 6 months ago has eliminated the use of scratch cards, beginning with UTME registration this year 2017 and henceforth.

According to the interview, conducted by the Nation Newspaper, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede was commenting on the challenges inherited and his style of dealing with those challenges. 

In his own words, He said: "What we have done is to fine-tune what is on ground to make our services better for the public. We have taken some very painful decisions like elimination of scratch cards. We know that some people earn a living from the sale of scratch cards but that is not the type of life we want to encourage, it is extortion.  They buy the card from our office and they sell at exorbitant price to the users. The scratch card has a particular amount, between N1,000 and N2,500 and they end up selling the cards four to five times higher. The scratch card has led to massive corruption in the system. As I speak, a number of our staff are with the police for some corrupt practices that are related to scratch card.

The second one is about the examination itself, we are not aware of anywhere in the world where you do Computer Based Test (CBT)and there would be no electronic monitoring. We believe that it is an omission on our part which we have now rectified.  We are insisting that all our CBT centres must have Close Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras. The reason is that if a student or candidate is not caught during the exam, the possibility of being caught after the examination is there and the evidence would also be there to show him clearly that he had actually cheated."