The Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB) says the body will introduce the use of USSD code as an option to the SMS process of generating a profile code for registration.
The board said this is a part of measures it had put in place to address some challenges experienced by candidates of its Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
The Registrar of the board, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, disclosed this during a news briefing at the board’s headquarters in Bwari, Abuja.
Oloyede said the use of the USSD code would commence from Friday, April 30.
He said the board had received complaints especially from parents of candidates who had tried to register their children and wards but had been unsuccessful.
He said that service providers had, however, continued to extort candidates by deducting N50 SMS charges at each trial to generate a profile without a positive response.
He noted that the charges were generated and received by the service providers.
He asked all those concerned to go back and ensure that where a service is not fully rendered and charges were deducted, such monies should be refunded to the candidates.
He added that JAMB does not have the capacity to enforce this refund or monitor compliance but that the board is expanding their stakeholders to include Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission to do it.
Oloyede said another option the board is creating asides sending an SMS to 55019 to generate a profile code will include dialing *55019*1*NIN# which will take effect from Friday, April 30.
The registrar, who frowned at candidates’ inability to follow the right procedure for the exercise, also said that the board, alongside its major stakeholders, had agreed to accommodate common errors made during the registration process.
Some of the errors, he noted, were candidates mistakenly sending ‘NIN’ with no space before typing the actual number.
Oloyede also said that candidates who had registered for UTME in the previous year could also generate a code with the same telephone number, following the 2021 process of generating a profile code.
He explained that the only difference between the previous registration process and that of this year was the inclusion of NIN.
The same code, he stated, might be sent to the candidate but would have undergone an upgrade from the board’s system.
He also noted that the board was connecting effectively with the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) on the registration process and have had not much to worry about.
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