According to The Nation, The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has announced that said it has redistributed candidates with lower cut-off marks than what their first choice institutions required to others. Candidates and parents are to check JAMB’s official website from Friday for their names and institutions.
The policy was put in place to ensure that candidates with a reasonable score of 180 and above were placed in an institutuion. The Board’s Head of Media, Dr. Fabian Benjamin stated that the newly imposed national cut-off marks of 180 for universities and 150 for polytechnics, colleges of education and innovative enterprise institutions in the 2015 UTME were set to benchmarks to determine the tone for admissions in 2015. The national cut-off marks are also to help tertiary institutions have a pool of qualitative and manageable candidates to choose from who are desirous of tertiary education.
This was declared in the statement: “However, universities and other levels of tertiary institutions are at liberty to go higher. But not lower, depending on their peculiarities and the performance of candidates that choose them. Universities are centres of excellence anywhere in the world and ours should not be an exception. The policy witnessed in University of Lagos (250 cut off mark) is aimed at ensuring that our universities admit only the top best as done globally.”
JAMB is determined to make Nigerian universities top-ranking in Africa and perhaps the world, The Nation reports.
“The board wishes to state that no candidate would be denied any right to aspire to tertiary education, even as it is aware that some universities have their own admission cut-off marks acceptable by the board for courses they offered. Please be informed that the board ensures that these institutions apply these cut off marks uniformly across all candidates without discrimination.”
“The decision of the Board on the print-out for this year’s exercise was done in good faith not to jeopardise the right of candidates due to individual cut-off set by some Nigerian tertiary institutions. Those candidates who do not meet the cut-off marks of such institutions will be placed in needy institutions within their geopolitical zone depending on available space in such institutions.”
“The board’s aim is to accommodate as many candidates as possible instead of just pushing them to schools we know ab initio don’t have the carrying capacity to admit all. For instance, University of Lagos with a carrying capacity of about 9,000, has over 60,000 applying. The question is what happens to the over 50,000? We have other institutions like that and what we are doing is to ensure that the balance are also placed in other needy institutions.”
Source: The Nation News
