•Begins sale of UTME forms this month
From Fred Ezeh, Abuja
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) yesterday announced that it would commence the sale of 2017 UTME application documents this month, having concluded all reforms and innovation that would guarantee a hitch-free Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) process this year.
The board was also convinced that the reforms introduced recently would end all issues and discrepancies that hitherto questioned the competence and credibility of the board to conduct such matriculation exams.
JAMB spokesman, Dr. Fabian Benjamin, in a statement yesterday, noted that the board renewed its commitment to ensure that a reasonable percentage of candidates who would sit for the 2017 UTME examination and, subsequently, qualify find placement in tertiary institutions.
He said that the new JAMB system would insist that candidates supply their ‘O’ Level result on its website during registration or later, but before admission commences, for them to be considered for admission, as the board believes that “this will allow only qualified candidates to be considered for admission.”
Furthermore, he stated that the Central Admissions Processing System has been designed to interface with institutions and ensure that they strictly comply with the new guidelines.
“In simple terms, no candidate would 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, second, third, fourth choice and not ‘most preferred,’ as it was previously,” he said.
The JAMB spokesman explained candidates could choose College, University, Innovative Enterprises Institutions (IEI) or Polytechnic/Monotechnic as first choice: “However, if a candidate chooses a public university as first choice, he will not have any other public university to choose as second, third and fourth choice.
“He will have on the remaining three choices, a college, polytechnic, private university and IEI. Candidates for the 2017 UTME can as well select NCE (college) or ND (polytechnic/monotechnic) as their first choice, up to third choice and the fourth must be IEI. They can also select the IEI as their first choice up to the fourth choice, but can only pick a public university once.”
According to the board, “the registration of 2017 UTME will be conducted simultaneously with the Direct Entry, and, during registration, candidates’ 10 fingers are to be captured using biometric verification machine.”