Yekeen Nurudeen

Ahead of the  Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, billed  to hold in May 2017, the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board,  JAMB, has said candidates who are awaiting their O’ level results would no longer qualify to apply for the annual matriculation examination.

The Board disclosed this in statement issued in Abuja on Tuesday by the Head of JAMB Public Relations, Fabian Benjamin.

The statement also revealed that the sale of application form for the examination would start in the month of March, adding that  candidates have also been restricted to choosing only one public university while they also have the opportunity of a fourth choice.

The statement reads: “The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) had concluded all restructuring, transformation, reforms and other preparation for the 2017 UTME and is now set to commence the sale of its application document in March, 2017.

“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.

“To achieve this, JAMB will insist that candidates supply their result on its website during registration or later, but before admissions commences for them to be considered for admissions.

“We believe this will allow only qualified candidates to be considered for admissions.

“We have designed a Central Admissions Processing System (CAPS) where the Board will interface with the institutions and ensure the compliance of this reform.

“The summary is that no candidate will 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 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, IEI, or Polytechnic/Monotechnic.

“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/Monotechnic) as their 1st choice up to 3rd choice and the 4th, Innovative Enterprise Institution, (ND).

“They can select the IEI, as their 1st choice up to the 4th choice, but can only pick a public university once.”

The statement explained that the restructuring is to expand the opportunities available to candidates noting that almost all the public universities do not consider candidates on the second choice list as they hardly exhaust their first choice.

It added that the registration of UTME this year would  go side by side with the  Direct Entry and during registration, candidates ten fingers are to be captured using Biometric Verification Machine, BVM.

The Board also warned that no cyber café would be registering candidates for its examination saying “on no account should any candidate patronize any cyber café for our registration. It is important to note that the Board will not deploy the use of any scratch card for the 2017 UTME registration exercise.”