The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has announced that all Computer-Based Test (CBT) centres must adopt the Microsoft Camera system for candidate registration ahead of the 2026 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
Gatekeepers News reports that the Board said the new directive is part of efforts to strengthen identity verification and curb registration-related examination malpractice.
The enforcement was reiterated during a monitoring visit by JAMB’s Gombe State Coordinator, Mr. Johnson Adebiyi, to the El-Lawanti ICT Centre in Gombe on September 30, 2025. The visit was aimed at assessing compliance ahead of the October 1 deadline for full adoption of the technology.
Why the Directive
JAMB said the move follows findings from the 2025 UTME, where some CBT centres were discovered to have engaged in image blending and other digital manipulations to aid impersonation.
“The Board will not tolerate any breach of the new directive,” Adebiyi warned, stressing that defaulting centres risk being delisted from JAMB’s registration network.
He encouraged accredited centres to take advantage of new opportunities under the Board’s expanded services, including registration tasks previously reserved for JAMB’s Professional Registration and Testing Centres (PRTCs).
Adebiyi also noted that JAMB-accredited CBT centres stand to benefit from future collaborations with other examining bodies such as the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) and the National Examinations Council (NECO), both of which are expanding their adoption of the CBT model.
Background
The new registration protocol comes after JAMB established a 23-member Special Committee on Examination Infractions in August 2025 to investigate over 6,400 suspected cases of technology-driven malpractice uncovered during the 2025 UTME.
According to the report, investigators found 4,251 cases of biometric manipulation (known as finger blending), 190 cases of AI-assisted image morphing, 1,878 false albinism declarations, and several instances of credential forgery and multiple NIN registrations.
JAMB Registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, clarified that while the infractions were mostly linked to the registration process, confirmed cases of malpractice during the actual exams remained relatively low — around 140 cases.
In response to these findings, the Federal Government has approved a three-year ban for students found guilty of exam malpractice across all national external examinations, including JAMB, WAEC, NECO, and NABTEB. The sanctions will be enforced using candidates’ National Identification Numbers (NIN) to prevent offenders from re-registering under false identities.
