There will be no admission for candidates who scored less than 170 in the last Universities Matriculation Examination (UME) following the decision of the Joint Committee on Admission to peg the national cut-off point at 170. However, JAMB said yesterday that results of 16,000 candidates out of the 22,395 candidates earlier withheld on account of examination malpractices have now been released.

Registrar and Chief Executive of JAMB, Prof. Dibu Ojerinde, told journalists in Abuja on Tuesday that the national cut-off points was jacked up from 160 last year to 170 this year to reflect the improvement in the performances of candidates in the last examination.

He, however, expressed concern that some states would not be able to fill their quota of university admission in the coming academic year even if the cut off marks was to be reduced to 150. He said he had asked the various degree-awarding institutions to adopt a system of differential cut-off marks in order to bridge the gap between educationally less developed states and the others.

The JAMB registrar said the differential cut-off marks for the states which will be lower than the national one were yet to be decided upon by the relevant body, adding that in arriving at a decision, the body would take into consideration how many candidates sat for the examination in such state and the performances of the candidates.

Ojerinde explained that in a situation where a particular state presented only 731 candidates for the UME, there was no way such a state could meet its admission quota, even if it was given a differential cut-off marks, adding that “it’s a way of bridging the gap.”
He also disclosed that additional 16,000 results out of the 22, 395 earlier declared withheld by JAMB on account of examination malpractice had now been released following the decision of the relevant committee of the board to release the results. He, however, said those whose results are yet to be released will not get any result as the committee had decided that the results be cancelled.
Similarly, Ojerinde said 6,000 scripts could not be scanned by the computer following the inability of the students to comply with relevant instructions on shading of the answer sheets.
He regretted that parents have been besieging his office seeking for explanation for the non-release of their wards’ results, and warned that parents should not visit the sins of their children on JAMB.
According to him, JAMB will now have to charge N25,000 to the production of the answer script of any candidate who insists on seeing it.
“This particular script is like an art work and the candidate wants result. You can’t reap where you did not sow, shading the correct column is part of the examination,” Ojerinde said, while producing the script of a candidate.