By Adesina Soyooye
The Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, has revealed that there is evidence that Mmesoma Ejikeme, the 16- year old student of Anglican Girls Secondary School, Nnewi, who declared herself the highest scorer in the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, conducted by JAMB, collaborated with scammers to forge and inflate her scores.
Mmesoma had claimed that she scored 362 based on the result slip she printed from the JAMB portal.
However, she was swiftly countered by the Examination body which declared her scores fake and a product of forgery. The student, revealed JAMB, scored 249, a comfortable score which could have given her an admission in her University of choice, but not the scholarship and celebration she was expecting.
The score saga led to controversy, with a number of people, including former Minister for Education, Dr Oby Ezekwesili who weighed-in, and urged Oloyede to invite Technological Experts for a forensic investigation of the matter.
But in a transcript sent by the Registrar to The Punch, Oloyede disclosed that there is a booming industry faking JAMB result for students with their collaboration. “Presently, there is an industry faking results, and unfortunately, they cannot penetrate the JAMB system”, he said, adding that: “Unfortunately, parents and some of the candidates who are being fooled are not aware that they have only been fooled.”
Specifically on Mmesoma’s case, Professor Oloyede said: “There is internal evidence to show that the change in Mmesoma’s scores were done with her collaboration. There are certain features pertaining to her that only her knows, and unless she makes them available to somebody else, they couldn’t have increased her score on her behalf.”
He said that he had spoken to Dr Ezekwesili on Mmesoma’s matter, and told her it was “a high- level scam.”
His words: “We improved on our facilities this year, so, Ejikeme and her collaborators were still living in the past. I spoke with Mrs Ezekwesili on the matter, and I told her it was a high-level scam, a careless forgery.
“This is because we are no longer using some of the things they used in changing those results since 2021. We used that pattern in 2021, and you saw what happened, and many of such individuals were caught as well, and they were treated accordingly.”
Miss Ejikeme has been banned by JAMB, for the next three years, from any of the Boards Examinations.
