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The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has confirmed that 1,475,477 candidates will sit for this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME), scheduled to hold between Tuesday, March 10, and Saturday, March 21.
Two hundred and eight prison inmates, drawn from Kaduna and Ikoyi prisons, and 192 visually impaired candidates will participate in the 2015 UTME which marks the commencement of full-blown Computer Based Tests.
The examination will be written across 400 centers in the country and seven foreign countries which include Ghana, Cameroon, Republic of Benin, London, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Ethiopia.
The Registrar and Chief Executive of JAMB, Prof. ‘Dibu Ojerinde at a press briefing on Thursday in Abuja, however, said applications for 2015 UTME showed a slight decrease of 156,695 candidates, when compared with that of 2014 when 1,632,172 candidates applied for the examination.
Imo State has the highest number of applications with 104,381, while Delta State comes second with 78,854 candidates.
Anambra State has a total of 77,689 candidates who applied for the examination while FCT has the lowest with 4,085.
Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states, where Boko Haram has displaced several resident, also rank among the lowest with 15,692, 15,613 and 10,044 candidates respectively.
Apart from insecurity in the north east, Ojerinde cited the mad rush for tertiary education outside the shores of the country as a contributory factor for the low application by candidates this year.
For the visually impaired, Ojerinde explained that they would use the Braille note Apex Computer to write the examination, stressing that most of the candidates for the UTME had printed their e-registration slips with which they would sit the examination.