The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) says candidates who were unable to sit the 2026 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) due to disruptions in some centres will be rescheduled to write the exam at a later date.
Fabian Benjamin, JAMB’s public communication advisor, gave the assurance during the Senate Committee on Tertiary Education’s monitoring of the ongoing UTME in Abuja on Friday.
The board said about 2.2 million candidates are expected to sit the examination across 966 computer-based test (CBT) centres nationwide. However, on Thursday, when the exercise began, complaints trailed technical glitches and delays at some centres, preventing candidates from taking the exam.
Speaking during the briefing, Benjamin acknowledged the challenges but described them as not unusual for an exercise of such scale. “We are assuring all Nigerians that every candidate who has registered for this exam will be allowed to sit this exam,” he said.
“If your centre fails today, you will be rescheduled again to take the exam. For any reason, even when you are rescheduled, and you are unable to sit the examination, you will be rescheduled again.” He noted that the board has made provisions through a mop-up exercise to accommodate affected candidates.
“That is why when we finish the exam, we have what we call the mop-up… to ensure that candidates whose centres failed and they could not take the exam are given another date,” he added.
Benjamin further noted that occasional disruptions were expected given the scale of the exercise. “Naturally, you should have one or two challenges here and there. It is not unusual… you cannot conduct an exam in over one thousand centres and expect that you won’t have any problem,” he said.
“But the most important thing is that if these problems occur, are you prepared to handle them? And that is what we have done. All those candidates will be rescheduled to another date and centre where they will sit the examination.”
On his part, Mohammed Dandutse, chairman of the senate committee on tertiary institutions and TETFund, acknowledged the challenges and assured that efforts would be made to improve operations at CBT centres.
“So definitely we are going to address it and we are going to make sure that all the CBT centres are well functional and efficient. Because there is no moral justification for somebody to come from far away and be left stranded without writing the exam,” Dandutse said.