The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has told prospective candidates for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) that they would not be offered admission until they produce their Senior School Certificate Examination (SSCE) OLevel result. Also, the examination body has restricted the choice of candidates to only one public university, paving the way for patronage of private universities. It also said that
potential candidates now have the opportunity of a fourth choice. The sale of application form for the examination would start in March.
These are the products of a restructuring of admission process carried out by the Board ahead of this year UTME that has been fixed to hold in May. But the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) have rejected the policy. Head of JAMB Public Relations, Dr. Fabian Benjamin, in a statement issued in Abuja yesterday, stated that candidates who are awaiting their O-Level results have been ruled out from securing admission into universities.
The statement reads: “The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) had concluded all restructuring, transformation, reforms and other preparation for the 2017 UTME and is now set to commence the sale of its application document in March, 2017.
“In the course of conducting admission exercise, many institutions have admitted candidates on merit only for them to discover that such candidates do not have qualified ‘O’ level results or the right combination for admission and had to delete and start the process all over again. With this, they would have denied other qualified candidates the opportunities for admissions.
“This we are addressing by ensuring that no candidate is, henceforth, recommended without his ‘O’ level result being supplied. To achieve this, JAMB will insist that candidates supply their result on its website during registration or later, but before admission commences for them to be considered for admissions.
We believe this will allow only qualified candidates to be considered for admissions. “We have designed a Central Admissions Processing System (CAPS) where the Board will interface with the institutions and ensure the compliance of this reform.
The summary is that no candidate will be admitted with awaiting result.” The JAMB justified the restriction of candidates to only one public university. The statement explained that the restructuring is to expand the opportunities available to candidates, noting that almost all the public universities do not consider candidates on the second choice list as they hardly exhaust their first choice.
The board said: “Candidates and their parents are also to note that the Board has restructured the registration platform to allow for only one choice of public university. The new registration platform will now be first choice, second choice, third choice and fourth choice and not most preferred, preferred etc., as it was.
“Candidates’ first choice can be a College, University, Innovative Enterprises Institutions or Polytechnic/Monotechnic. However, if a candidate makes a public university his first choice, he will not have any public university to choose for 2nd, 3rd and 4th choice.
“He will have on the re maining three choices, a college, a polytechnic, private university and IEI’S. However, candidates for the 2017 UTME can now select NCE (College) or ND (Polytechnic/Monotechnic) as their 1st choice up to 3rd choice and the 4th IEI.
They can select the IEI (Innovative Enterprise Institution, ND) as their 1st choice up to the 4th choice, but can only pick a public university once.” It added that the registration of UTME this year would go side by side with the Direct Entry and during registration, candidates’ 10 fingers are to be captured using Biometric Verification Machine (BVN). The Board also warned that no cybercafé would be registering candidates for its examination, saying “on no account should any candidate patronise any cybercafé for our registration. It is important to note that the Board will not deploy the use of any scratch card for the 2017 UTME registration exercise.”
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