Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, on Wednesday, explained why the exams umpire decided to slash one hour off the regular three hours duration candidates sit for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

He explained that the demographic population targeted for UTME had been proven to have a short-attention span and that as such keeping them for more than two hours would cause them to lose their presence of mind.

According to him, the reduction of hours was also in line with international best standards and practices where no candidate was kept in an examination such as UTME for more than two hours.

Oloyede stated this in Kaduna during the opening ceremony of a strategic planning retreat on the monitoring, supervision and evaluation of 2017 UTME with the theme: “Inclusiveness and sensitisation of key external actors”.‎

He said: “We are going to reduce the duration of the examination for this year’s UTME. You cannot keep children of this age for three hours. For their age, the maximum time you can keep them is two hours.

“So, we are considering the reduction in the time they spend because once it is more than two hours you can’t expect that they will retain their presence of mind.”

He further disclosed that a total of 240,000 candidates had so far registered for the examination which had been scheduled for May 20, barely one week after the commencement of the sale of forms which is expected to end on April 22.

Oloyede added that out of 13 commercial banks and the Nigeria Postal Service that had signified interest in the sales of the admission forms, only nine had paid for the number of application documents they required in the first instance.