The Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof Is-haq Oloyede, has said that the Board has created an ‘Exceptionally Bright Window’ for candidates younger than 16 years old to take the annual Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
Oloyede, who made this disclosure during the Sunday episode of Inside Sources with Laolu Akande, a socio-political program broadcast on Channels Television, emphasised that although the examination authority has implemented a minimum age requirement of 16 for students entering tertiary institutions, there was a demand for below-16 candidates to participate in the UTME due to the presence of a limited number of extraordinary students.
“In Nigeria, there are many brilliant students; we have so many excellent people. We enforce the 16-year minimum entry into tertiary institutions, but some say exceptional students exist. Yes, there are exceptional students, but there are just one in a million.
“We are saying 16 years is the minimum, but if you know you are exceptional, register for exceptional candidacy–that is, you are less than 16 years old and exceptional,” he said.
The JAMB registrar criticised the trend among parents who alter their children’s ages, saying some students between 10 and 12 had been registered for the UTME.
“I’m surprised, just from Monday to now, over 2,000 have registered in the whole country. Some of them are 10, 11, and 12-year-olds whose parents have found crooked ways of jumping classes.”
“The parents want to use the children to decorate their CVs. They want to say, “I am the mother of a lawyer; my child graduated at age 13,” he added.
In November 2024, Dr. Tunji Alausa, the Minister of Education, announced reinstating the 16-year admission age requirement for tertiary institutions, reversing the previous 18-year benchmark.
