Some potential candidates for the 2014/2015 Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) examination in Kaduna State, on Friday decried the slow process in registering for the examination.
The candidates, who expressed their feeling in separate interviews with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Kaduna, said that they spent more than six hours to get registered.
NAN correspondent who visited JAMB centres office in Kaduna reports that candidates were seen on long queues to be registered.
A candidate, Sunday Dodo, who said he was on queue as early as 7a.m, attributed the delay to few centers.
He advised the board to allow for more centres to ease the current hardship facing the candidates.
Miss Rejoice Bulus described the exercise as “stressful’’ and urged JAMB to find ways of making the process easier.
She also suggested to JAMB to allow cyber cafes to also conduct the registration.
Miss Justina Jonathan blamed the delay partly on “jostling and pushing for position on the queue’’ by the candidates.
She, however, advised the board to engage more officials to conduct the registration to make the process faster.
Responding to the complaints, the board’s Coordinator in the state, Mr Matthew Audu, advised the candidates to calm nerves saying the registration would continue until January 2015.
He said that only 15 centres were allowed to conduct the registration across the state to protect the integrity of the process.
The coordinator recalled that the process was greatly abused during previous examinations when Internet cyber cafes were allowed to conduct the registration.
“The cyber cafes did not play according to the rules of the game, what they were asked to do was not what they did.
“They messed up the whole exercise and we decided to say, this time, they will not participate in the exercise.
“We decided to entrust the whole exercise to those centres that will be conducting it.
“There are few of them; that is why we are seeing this long queue,” he said.
The coordinator said that JAMB had raised the number of centres from four to 15 in the state adding that more would be opened in due course.
According to him, each of the 15 cenres has also opened several registration units.
Audu expressed the hope that Federal and State Governments would build more computer-based test centres to fast-track the process.