Ebun Francis || The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has stopped candidates awaiting their O’level results from participating in the universities tertiary matriculation examination (UTME).
JAMB’S decision was contained in a statement on Tuesday signed by Fabian Benjamin, its spokesman.
Benjamin revealed that the change was part of the restructuring exercise embarked upon by Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, the current registrar.
According to him, “The board is poised to see that a reasonable percentage of candidates who take this examination and are qualified find placement in tertiary institutions.”
“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’levels 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. No candidate will be admitted with awaiting result.”
The statement also stated that going forward, candidates would have to submit their O’level results before admission process begins and that they have been restricted to the choice of only one public university.
“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,” he 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/mono technic. 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 remaining 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/mono technic) 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.
“This 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.
“We sincerely appreciate the patience exhibited by Nigerians in allowing us to take the time to add value to the services we have been offering to Nigerians for over three decades.”