JAMB Restructures, Scraps Awaiting Results

Senator Iroegbu in Abuja

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has concluded all restructuring, transformation, reforms and other preparation for the 2017 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) and is now set to commence the sale of its application document in March 2017.

To this end, the board has scrapped awaiting results in its admission criteria, instead, include fourth choice in the institution preference.

The Head of Information, JAMB, Mr. Fabian Benjamin, disclosed this in a statement yesterday, appreciating the patience exhibited by Nigerians in allowing the agency the time to add value to their services for over three decades.

Benjamin said the restructuring was informed by the need to achieve a different and progressive result that will position Nigerian educational system in an enviable height in the comity of nations.

He said the Board is poised to see that a reasonable percentage of candidates who take this examination are qualified find placement in tertiary institutions.

JAMB spokesman said: “In the cause 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’levels result being supplied. To achieve this, JAMB will insist that candidates supply their result on its website during registration or later, but before admissions commences for them to be considered for admissions. We believe this will allow only qualified candidates to be considered for admissions.”
Benjamin stated that JAMB has 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. 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 as it was before,” he stressed.

According to the JAMB spokesperson, the candidate first choice can be a college, university, Innovative Enterprises Institution (IEI) or polytechnic/monotechnic.

However, he said, 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.
Benjamin explained that the candidate would have on the remaining three choices, a college, a polytechnic, private university and IEI.

He also revealed that 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 (ND) as their 1st choice up to the 4th choice, but can only pick a public university once,” he added.

Benjamin further explained that restructuring is to expand the opportunities available to candidates as almost all the public universities do not consider candidates on the second choice list because they hardly exhaust their first choice.

He further stated that the registration of UTME this year would go side by side with the Direct Entry (DE) and during registration, candidates 10 fingers are to be captured using Biometric Verification Machine (BVN).
“Again, we want to inform candidates that no cyber café will be registering candidates for our examination,” he said.

He warned that on no account should any candidate patronise any cybercafé for its registration, adding that the Board will not deploy the use of any scratch card for the 2017 UTME registration exercise.