The Registrar, Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board, Prof Ishaq Oloyede has disclosed that exceptional students below the age of 16 can register for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, noting that the board had opened the Exceptionally Brilliant Window for such candidates.
He noted that while the examination body had enforced the minimum age requirement for any students into tertiary institutions at 16, the need for below-16s to sit for the UTME was necessitated by the number of rare, exceptional students.
Oloyede, a former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ilorin, stated this in Lagos, as he condemned how some parents now raise the ages of their children, citing a case in which students between the ages of 10 to 12 had been registered for the UTME.
“In Nigeria, there are many brilliant students, we have so many excellent people. We are enforcing the 16-year minimum entry into tertiary institutions but some people are saying there are exceptional students. Yes, there are exceptional students but they 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.
“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.
“Normal children cannot grow at a rate higher than their biological age. What parents are now doing is increasing the age of their children, they are doing everything, affidavit of age and everything.
“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,” Oloyede lamented.
