The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) Thursday said 180 candidates paid N30,000 each through its decoy website order to indulge in examination malpractice in the forthcoming Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
Addressing reporters Thursday at a CBT centre located within JAMB headquarters, during the monitoring of Mock UTME exam, the registrar, Professor Is-haq Olanrewaju Oloyede, said the culprits will be punished through seizure of their UTME and Direct Entry (DE) for exhibiting cheating tendencies.
He said over 211,000 candidates sat for the Mock UTME across designated Computer-Based Test (CBT) centres in the country, assuring the result will be released Friday.
He said the mock exam will be used to correct any identified problem in the system ahead of the UTME scheduled for April 25.
He said: “The word is mock and we want to say so far, so good. What we want to do is to try some things. As students are getting wiser, we are also getting better because we are doing certain things to ensure that those things are done.
“So we are trying to make sure that when we go for the exam, we would have taken experience and taken some lessons from our experience at the mock level. We urge candidates that are being used for the experiment to please bear with us.
“We need to let the students know that the best way to pass the examination, UTME in particular, is to study. We are aware of some rogue websites asking people to come and pay that they can help. It cannot work. We have also opened our own rogue website and as of this morning, about 180 students have paid.
“So those who paid into that account, looking for questions, we are going to deal firmly with them and many of the institutions, because to attempt to cheat is already an infraction. UTME is not a school-based examination.