The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board said, on Tuesday, that it would begin the sale of forms for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination in March, 2017.
A statement by the spokesperson for JAMB, Dr. Fabian Benjamin, said the agency had taken time to add value to the services it had been offering to Nigerians for over three decades.
Benjamin stated, “In the course of conducting admission, 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 of subjects 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 admissions commence for them to be considered for admissions. We believe this will allow only qualified candidates to be considered for admissions.”
The board explained that candidates would henceforth be allowed to make one choice of public university, in which new registration platform will now be first choice, second choice, third choice and fourth choice.
According to him, the restructuring is aimed at expanding the opportunities available to candidates since almost all the public universities do not consider candidates on the second choice list because they hardly exhaust the applicants on the first choice list.
Benjamin said, “We have designed a central admissions processing system, where the board will interface with the institutions and ensure compliance with this reform.
“The summary is that no candidate will be admitted with awaiting result. Candidates and their parents are also to note that JAMB 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 e.t.c 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 second, third and fourth choice. He will have on the remaining three choices, a college, polytechnic, private university and IEIs.
“However, candidates for the 2017 UTME can now select the National Certificate in Education (College) or National Diploma (Polytechnic/Monotechnic) as their first choice up to third choice and the fourth IEI. They can select the IEI (Innovative Enterprise Institution, ND) as their first choice up to the fourth choice, but can only pick a public university once.”
He added that the registration for the 2017 UTME and direct entry would go on at the same time, stating that during registration, candidates’ 10 fingers would be captured through the biometric verification machine.
Benjamin also warned candidates that no cyber café would register candidates for the UTME.
Benjamin stated, “On no account should any candidate patronise any cyber café for registration. It is important to note that the board will not deploy the use of any scratch card for the 2017 UTME registration.
“The board is poised to see that a reasonable percentage of candidates, who take this examination and are qualified, find placement in tertiary institutions.”
