The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board has launched a probe into the credentials of applicants dating back to 2009.
This implies that persons who cheated the system to pass the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination to get into school and may have even graduated and participated in the National Youth Service Corps will be arrested and their certificates withdrawn.
The Head, Media and Information of JAMB, Fabian Benjamin, said this during an interview with Punch on Monday saying the probe had begun and it would be completed in record time as JAMB had acquired software which would be able to identify fake biometric data.
Speaking in a separate interview on 95.1 Nigeria Info FM Abuja, the JAMB spokesman said, “We want to do what we call biometric verification dating 10 years back. Even if you are now working and we discovered that someone wrote exams for you, we will publish your name and the law agencies will do the needful.
“We have the biometric data from 10 years ago. We will compare the photos with thumbprints and names. We discovered that a candidate could have taken exams with 30 different names.”
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Benjamin further said, “If you graduated from university and you did not take UTME, it means the foundation is faulty and the building cannot stand. We have already started the probe but we will go deeper after the exams.
“It will not take too long. We are using the software, so it will just check the biometric data of candidates and if the biometric data of someone shows about six different names, then it will notify us.
So, if one person’s photo brings up different names and we have spotted this, we will find out where the person is and then we will pick them up.”