The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has revealed the discovery of approximately 1,665 fraudulent A’level results in the Direct Entry registration procedure.

The board’s weekly bulletin, disclosed in Abuja on Tuesday, indicated that Professor Is-haq Oloyede, the Registrar, shared this information during a meeting with representatives from the National Association of Nigeria Colleges of Education Students.

Oloyede highlighted that the verification of A’level results was prompted by the pervasive corruption within the system and the imperative to uphold the integrity of the admission process.

Mr Oloyede said the institutions must take measures to safeguard the integrity of their certificates, adding that JAMB would continue to scrutinise the certificates through measures that would stand the test of time.

He mentioned that among the counterfeit results, 397 were from Colleges of Education, 453 were university diplomas, and the remainder pertained to various other A’level certificates.

The registrar recalled that in the past, when a candidate applied for Direct Entry, the Board would simply ask awarding institutions to do the necessary screening and due diligence.

He however said that JAMB was dumbfounded by the startling revelations from Bayero University, Kano, where out of the 148 Direct Entry applications to the institution, only six of the certificates forwarded for processing were genuine.

The registrar added that it was the discovery of this monumental fraud that prompted the meeting of critical stakeholders, who met to chart ways of combating the menace.

Part of the measures suggested, he said, was the constitution of an A’level result verification task force as well as the creation of a common platform for the verification of A’level results and certificates.

He said the platform was reliable and user-friendly as it only took five minutes to verify any certificate.
Mr Oloyede also disclosed that the board had adopted “No verification, No admission” policy.

The registrar said 15 institutions had not sufficiently complied with the verification requests from the board, adding that more than 20 unverified candidates were affected.

He said that the board would have to pre-verify candidates applying with the certificates of the 15 institutions before they could complete their Direct Entry (DE) registration process.

According to him, in the ongoing DE registration, candidates could go ahead and register while the school verify them at the backend.

He, however, declared that the 15 institutions, which were yet to fully comply, would have to pre-verify holders of their certificates before they complete registration process.

(NAN)